


Just a Reflection

by Derkish



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Campaign 1 (Critical Role), Canon Compliant, Established Relationship, Existential Crisis, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Persistent Injury, Platonic Relationships, Post-Canon, Reunions, Separation, Yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:47:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 77,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23267971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derkish/pseuds/Derkish
Summary: Percy goes to sleep in Whitestone one ordinary night and wakes up in modern-day NYC, surrounded by people who think he is someone else entirely. He takes it about as well as you'd expect.But Percy knows who he is: a retired adventurer, a father, a husband.  You can't make that stuff up.Right?Here's the other thing: he's not alone.
Relationships: Kima/Allura Vysoren, Percival "Percy" Frederickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III & Kima, Percival "Percy" Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III/Vex'ahlia
Comments: 192
Kudos: 223





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Late to the party, as usual. Is anyone out there still reading campaign 1 stuff?!
> 
> Content warnings are nothing beyond what you'd experience in the campaign. I'll update tags as things get relevant, and provide any additional content warnings at the start of each chapter. If you have any specific concerns, hit me up. Rated M for some sexual content and because things get a little dark. 
> 
> No campaign 2 spoilers. All of campaign 1 is fair game, including the extras.

Chapter 1

Someone was holding a torch right above Percy’s face, which was a bit unusual. 

This was not one of those nights where Vex found him nodded off in an armchair with a fire dwindling in the hearth and a schematic unfurled on his lap. Percy had been the last to bed last this evening, after one final peek into each of the children’s rooms to make sure they were really asleep. 

Vesper was reading all the time now. More than once he had caught her awake far too late and had to coax a book out of her hands, which pained him to do, but she was impossible in the morning if she didn’t get enough sleep. The twins he often found hiding under the blankets with a midnight snack procured from who knows where, too giggly to fool him when he poked his head in the door. Only the baby was reliably asleep whenever he checked in on her. Presumably she slept so well because she spent her waking hours shrieking joyfully and flinging anything she could grab (he did not know where she got this energy, but he suspected that he was siphoning it directly from his own exhausted body).

Tonight, though, when he made his last rounds, the rooms were dim and still. Percy snuck down the hallway to his bedchamber and found Vex passed out as well, curled up beneath their large, quilted bedspread. The nights were getting cool in earnest now, but she liked to leave the windows cracked at night so she could hear the sounds of the late summer insects outside. She only half-woke when he slipped into bed beside her. 

“S’good?” Vex muttered, which approximately translated to “Is everything all right, dear?”

The air was chilly, but she was warm, and Percy snuggled in close to share the heat. 

“Yes,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “Just perfect.”

And he had fallen asleep. Which was why the sudden brightness was so disorienting. This was not the warm glow of a lamp, nor a torch, nor even the morning sun. It was white and cold, sourceless but hovering directly overhead. Percy shut his eyes even tighter as his pupils contracted painfully, and when he finally forced them open again—

The small chamber had four walls. They were white, and the smooth floor was white, and the ceiling—that unnatural brightness made him raise a hand to shield his face—also white. All of this information occurred to him in the background. The first thing he was able to grasp in his consciousness was this:

He was prone on a bed, but it was not his own, and Vex was not there. 

The second thing he realized was that he was not alone. Off to his left, two figures stood a few feet away. 

Instinctively, Percy flung an arm to the side for a weapon that was not there. He found a pair of glasses instead, but they felt light in his hand. They weren’t his glasses at all—the frames were round and made of a dark, opaque material, but his auxiliary lenses were missing. The glass embedded in them seemed too thin as well, but miraculously, when he put them on, his near vision came into perfect focus.

His body felt heavy and imbalanced, as if he’d been sleeping off a drink and woken up a little too soon to be completely sober. Rolling onto his side, Percy began to push himself up into a seated position, still wincing in the strange light. As he did, one of the two figures took a step backward. 

“Easy now—” said one of the strangers. 

Percy managed to sit up, and the thin, papery blanket fell down around his waist. He did not recognize his clothing. Someone had taken off his wedding band. He did not have time to process all of this before the voice spoke again.

“Frederick, can you hear me?”

Finally, he turned his head to look at them. They were two humans, both female. One was older, with pale hair fraying in wisps from the knot tied at the back of her head. She was wearing a sort of suit, and a white jacket. She had her hands tucked calmly into the pockets. To her side and slightly behind was a woman closer to his age, maybe thirty or so. Like her companion, this younger woman wore a similar set of neat, formal clothes and a white coat, but unlike the other, she was holding a clipboard up in front of her abdomen like a shield. She looked almost as surprised to see him as he was to see her.

“What is this?” he demanded, still too baffled to be angry, or afraid. 

“He’s definitely awake-awake this time,” the younger woman whispered, as though he could not hear her. “Should I get backup?”

The older one waved a hand. “No, no, I don’t think so. Frederick, do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Are you talking to me?” said Percy.

“Good, so you do.”

“Relatively speaking,” he said, suspiciously. His voice felt strained, his throat taut, as though he had not spoken in months. “I understand the words coming out of your mouth, but…”

“That’s all right. You have been out of sorts for a while, but things will be making sense soon.”

“Where is Vex’ahlia?”

In the background, the younger woman winced. “Dr. Miller, I’m going to page the pharmacy—”

“No, Hernandez.”

“But he’s still—”

“I said ‘no.’”

The young woman looked tempted to disobey the command for several long seconds before she relented. She sighed, letting the clipboard drop a few inches from its protective position. 

“I’d like to begin explaining some things to you, Frederick,” Dr. Miller said, “but I need you to agree to keep calm. Otherwise, we’ll have to start from scratch again, and that’s just more time where things go unexplained. Can you promise to keep calm?”

It was never a good start, Percy knew from experience, when complete strangers began a conversation by making threats and seeking promises. He nodded expressionlessly, looking for an alternative exit in his periphery. There was just the one door, behind them.

“Very good. I’m Doctor Janet Miller. This here is Dr. Joelle Martinez, a first year resident.” Dr. Miller crossed her arms, as if uncertain of where to begin. “It’s a little unusual that you came out of it so clearly all of a sudden. We’ve been trying to wean you off of the medication for weeks, but every time we dropped the dose enough to bring you back, you haven’t responded very well.”

Percy didn’t say anything—just listened, and waited. 

“You were in a pretty bad accident. You were crossing the street uptown when someone blew the red light… we’ve been taking care of you.”

After a pause, he said, “Where is my wife?”

The doctor shook her head. “This is the hard part. I know you may have some strange thoughts in your mind that feel like memories. This is a common side effect of your head injuries.”

“And?” he said impassively.

“You don’t have a wife. You’ve never had a wife.”

It seemed a little elaborate (not to mention a little rude) to be a prank, but there was no other reasonable explanation for it. Percy squinted at the two strangers and tried to see if they were spectral. His thirty-second birthday was in just a few days, and this seemed like the kind of nonsense that Scanlan might pull with a creative use of his mansion. He wasn’t clear on how they got him from his bed in his home, but then, he had seen stranger things.

“If this is meant to be funny, you’re doing a terrible job,” Percy said.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed. When he began to stand, though, his vision darkened and he felt himself tilting sideways—

“Careful!” 

Dr. Miller caught him before he could hit the ground. Hernandez rushed forward, and together, they sat him back up onto the bed. Now his heart was really racing. Whatever kind of cobbled-together nonsense this was, whoever concocted this prank, he was going to strangle them—

“Some food, I think, Hernandez,” the doctor said. “And plenty of fluids. Can you get his vitals for me as well?”

“Yeah, I’ll page a tech to bring up some lunch.”

As Hernandez disappeared from the door, Dr. Miller set a hand on Percy’s arm. He may have recoiled, were he not busy pressing his head between his hands to settle the spinning.

“We can discuss this more once you’ve had a few minutes to breathe,” she said. “Just know that it’s perfectly fine to feel confused. We’d be surprised if you weren’t. Over time, it will get better.”

There was something in her voice that he did not like. Guardedly, Percy tipped his chin to the side and looked her in the face. Her eyes confirmed what her voice had relayed: real, genuine concern. 

When he did not say anything, she sighed and nodded and lifted her hand away. 

“Hernandez will be right back to check your numbers. Sit tight for a few minutes.”

The moment the door closed, Percy slid back off the bed, gripping the metal frame this time as his blood pressure dropped again. He waited until the dark fog had cleared his vision before he let go and stood upright. The faintness was not quite like being drunk after all. More like the feeling of being awoken from the dead. 

He took a little longer than he’d like to cross the room, but by the time he got there, he felt that he had regained the full use of his limbs. Pausing to press his ear against the door, Percy listened, one hand resting on the cool steel handle. No footsteps, no voices. Quietly, he opened the door a crack and, seeing no one, slipped through it.

The corridor, like the room, was plain and barren. To his left, there were a few doorways and dead end, so he went right instead and scurried down the hall until he reached a blind corner. He stopped there and peeked around the side. This next hallway ran down even further, a long expanse of smooth white stone reflecting the strange lighting from above. There was a desk about halfway down, but no one was sitting at it, and the closest voices sounded far enough off. Percy headed toward it. He had to tell himself that someone was more likely to stop him if he was running than if he looked at ease. 

The desk was someone’s work station, clearly. There were some personal effects, a painting of a child in a frame (so detailed that it was unnervingly lifelike), and a black jacket slung over a chair. The surface of the desk was covered in a great deal of paper in folders, as well as some unfamiliar equipment—a thin black square stood on the desk, with a tablet that appeared to have letters engraved on it. Percy would have ordinarily been curious for a look, but he was in too much of a rush now. Instead, he grabbed the jacket and ducked his head under the desk to see what, if anything, was stashed there.

Someone’s bag. Jackpot. Percy stuck a hand inside and came up with a flat coin purse. Inside that, there were some crinkled green papers and a few coins. He pocketed the coins, and was about to investigate the papers for information on his location when he heard the sound of a door opening not too far away. Adrenaline flooded his chest, and he took off again down the hall, not daring to look behind, the coin purse still clutched in his hand. 

He pulled the jacket on over his tan-colored shirt as he walked. His clothing looked to be a uniform—had was not quite his size, with a shirt and trousers of the same color and material. A drawstring tied off at the waist to compensate for the bagginess. The jacket didn’t change much about his appearance, but he hoped it at least made him stand out less. After a few more long seconds of walking in the open hall, he found a door marked “stairway” that lead him down to what was noted as the first floor. The exit door emptied him into what looked like a central lobby. It was an enormous space, all shiny marble, and… full of people. Humans. Some sitting, others standing, a few pacing about. A few were similarly dressed in beige and sitting in wheeled chairs, being pushed by people in bizarre clothing, or people dressed in white coats like the women who had confronted him. No one seemed to notice him. Percy stood there for a few seconds, paralyzed, until he spotted a set of tall, tapered-glass doors across the room. 

The exit. Percy headed toward it, skirting between clusters of people. The doors had no handle, but opened on his approach as if by magic. He stutter-stepped short of the doorway in surprise. If the door was trapped, and he attempted to cross, it might recognize him as an escapee and close on him. He approached the side, cautiously, to see whether there was an obvious rune on the inside of the door. This wasn’t his specialty, but still…

While he was looking, another person crossed through the door and out into the air without even stopping to check for traps. A second person followed a moment later, and gave Percy a curious look, as if she thought it odd for him to be lingering there. He waited until she had gone before he followed. The door did not close on him. No alarms sounded, except for the one blaring continuously in his head. What he saw as he crossed the threshold to the outdoors, however, nearly knocked him flat.

It was like the first time he set foot in the fey wild. That stunned sense of awe washed over him at the sight of something beyond imagination—a dense crowd of humans dressed in strange and varied clothing, a hard walkway made out of solid stone, and flat-sided buildings so tall that he could not see where they ended and where the sky began. He tipped his head back to look up at them, but the towers seemed to tilt inward, looming over as if they had come alive and were bending down to stare at him. The noise suddenly surrounded him, foreign and clamoring. Percy’s vision spun again, but this time, out of sensory overload. And like his first trip to the fey wild, it did not take long for panic to strike him blind.

Pushing past a group of teenagers dressed in coats and scarves, he darted off without real intent or direction. He did not get too far until he stepped off the edge of the walkway and into the strangely smooth road, and a loud noise went off to his left. He froze, like a spooked deer, and realized that he had almost been run over by a… a cart? A bright yellow cart. A bright yellow cart with an enclosed roof, and no horse, and a person waving their hands at him and shouting—

“Fucking _move_ , you idiot!”

The person in the car slammed down a fist, and the loud sound emanated from the cart again, shocking Percy back into his body. 

“S-sorry!” Percy stammered, backing off to the safety of the walking path.

“Let’s go, moron!” the person yelled again, and the horseless cart raced off at a ludicrous speed. As it sped away, Percy noticed a sign affixed to the top of the cart. It read “TAXI” in glowing letters.

People were staring at him, he finally noticed. Most gave him a wide berth as they rushed past, a few steering their children away with not-so-covert glances. This was… not the mansion. He had never seen something like it.

Leaving that room was a mistake, he thought. He should go back to that place and talk to the woman who had called herself a doctor, and get some answers. She had least had seemed to know that something was wrong. Percy whipped around with the intent of retreating back to the white corridors of that strange place, only to realize that he did not recognize where he’d come from. The buildings all looked so different, and yet they all blended in to the same chaotic swirl.

A man wearing a hooded sweatshirt made a tentative move toward him and said, “You okay, man?”

Percy backed away from him as well, and nearly rolled his ankle stepping off the curb. He caught himself before he could fall back in front of another passing carriage—this one painted a shiny red.

“Fine!” he said, though he sounded anything but that. “Just having a nightmare.”

With that, he left the man looking confused and mildly concerned. Percy kept to the walking path this time, carefully avoiding the eye of anyone passing from the opposite side. He could feel his chest getting tight. In the rational part of his brain, overshadowed though it was, he knew that he needed a quiet place to collect himself. Eventually he came upon an alleyway that wasn’t teeming with people. Percy entered it, ducked around a massive metal bin that reeked of garbage, and sat down behind it with his back against the brick. 

He was hyperventilating. His breath could only get halfway out before he sucked in another, an involuntary movement from deep in his diaphragm. He could feel the heat of panic beginning to burn behind his eyes, but closed them and forced it back. Drawing his knees close to his chest, he put his forehead down and willed himself to be calm. He could figure all of this out. He just had to get a grip. 

Long minutes passed in the shadowed alley. The raucous noise was not so loud here, and as Percy sat, it grew even quieter. He tried to shift his focus away from the alien clamor and back to the sound of his breath. He drew it in through his nose, held it, and slowly blew it out through his mouth. After some time—he did not know how much—he felt as though he had returned to his body at last. 

“Okay,” he whispered to his knees. “Okay. Come on.”

Percy lifted his head. Strangely, this empty space was the most familiar thing he’d seen since he first woke up (if he was even awake—and he was not convinced that he was). The brick walls weren’t entirely foreign, and the ground was filthy with years of dirt. He had never heard of a place like this, but there were humans in it, and they didn’t seem to be afraid. Even if the buildings were monstrously huge and the locals had figured out how to enchant their carriages, there were still people behaving more or less normally. Which meant he wasn’t in any immediate danger, unless he walked out in front of another passenger cart. 

How long had he been here? He had no way of knowing for sure. Percy suddenly wished he had a mirror—he could at least see whether he looked the same. Dr. Miller had said they had been trying to bring him back for weeks.

He had only just gone to sleep, though. Percy would have sworn his life on that. If it was longer, then Vex will have undoubtedly noticed that he was gone. The children as well. If enough time had gone by, they might not even know him... but no. He couldn’t consider that. The thought was too horrible, too likely to make him reel back and lose control. And it was complete, indisputable nonsense.

Percy considered finding his way back to the doctors, but now that he had regained his senses, he wrote off that idea at once. They seemed to think he was someone else. They had told him that he didn’t have a wife. Percy didn’t trust them. 

The question was where to begin. His ten minutes of consciousness had been enough to tell him there had to be information out here. Percy started with the simplest experiment. Though he suspected he knew what would happen, he raised his hands and muttered a few arcane words. The movement came to him immediately, the phrase well-practiced on his tongue, but nothing arose from it. No black cloud of hex spread out from the air. No magic. Something about the feel of this place had told him as much.

Now that he was alone, he looked through the oddly flat coin purse that he had stolen from the bag. In addition to several coins and pieces of paper with numbers on them, he found a card with the image of a man on it. The name Michael Owens was printed on the card, along with some other information that he did not understand. Clearly it was an identification card of some sort. Percy inspected the image. For such a small picture, the detail was incredible—too perfect to be a painting. He put it back and examined the rest of the contents. There were a few other cards made of the same sturdy, flexible material. None of them had any useful information on them, or at least, no information that he knew enough about to find helpful, except the last one. It was a red card, imprinted in gold with the visage of a lion’s head. On the front, in bold letters, it read “New York Public Library.”

A library! If ever he could ask for a place to begin to piece things together, a library was it. 

Percy had a plan. Part of a plan. And as long as he had a plan, he had something, and even a small something was everything. 

He stood from the dusty curb, tucking Michael’s coin purse into the pocket of Michael’s jacket. He swayed dangerously on the spot. Hopefully, Michael’s funds could also purchase enough food and drink to get him to the library on his own two feet. This place couldn’t be too big—he would find his way out soon enough.

Back out on the street, he set out in search for the first friendly-looking establishment he could find. Now that he had brought his pulse down to a functional level, he forced himself not just to look around while walking, but to actually see. 

Out here, the air was much warmer than home, but not too warm to take off the jacket. If he was meant to be under the care of doctors, then he was a patient. And if he was a patient, then at the moment, he was also an escapee. Which meant that someone would be coming for him, eventually. The jacket at least shielded him from looking like a madman in a jumpsuit.

The sky was the same color blue that he had always seen. Filtered sun cast the same light, throwing the same sort of shadows where monstrous buildings obstructed its path. There were trees lined up between the walking path and the road, evenly spaced enough that he assumed they’d been planted there. Their boughs were full of leaves in the most shocking and attractive colors—vibrant reds, intense yellows, even the darkest purples. They seemed to glow like lanterns where the sun managed to shine through them, and skittered across the pathway in swathes when the wind blew. He thought at once of Keyleth and what she’d think of this display. Without stopping, he bent and picked up a fallen leaf. He twirled it by the stem and tried to recall if he’d ever seen this type. It had five points, and a gradient that transitioned from maroon to the color of a tangerine. He slipped it into his pocket and resumed his search for food and drink.

The selection of shops and places to eat seemed limitless, but they were foreign and strange. The tall glass windows of the buildings displayed food he’d never heard of, impractical clothing, and objects well beyond his current capacity for comprehension. After what felt like an hour of bewildered ogling, a storefront on the corner caught his eye. 

The facade of this particular business was painted black, with intricate gold trim framing the lines of the pillars and the door frame. Somehow, it looked both new and as though it had been there since the beginning of time. Above the door, painted in that same gold lettering, the sign read Old Man’s Pub. It called to him like a lighthouse in the fog, and Percy hurried over to it, taking care not to cross paths with another cart.

The inside was cleaner than the most of the taverns he’d frequented. Smelled better, too. Along the far wall, there was a bar with one patron sitting at the counter. A few more sat sporadically throughout at small, circular tables. He felt a bizarre sort of relief at the familiarity of the space, even if it was simultaneously alien to him. There was a small comfort in knowing that wherever he was, people were still drinking in dark, communal spaces. 

His barstool of choice scraped against the polished floor as he pulled it out to sit on it. The sound caught the attention of the bartender, who had been placing clean glasses in the cabinet. He was an older man, with thinning hair and a stomach that Percy was sure could bowl him over. 

“What’ll it be?” he asked. He had a gruff voice, but not unfriendly.

“It depends,” said Percy. He withdrew Michael’s purse from his pocket, dumped the coins out on the counter. “What can I get for this?”

The bartender looked down at the money on the countertop, then back at Percy. The only other person at the bar—a dark-skinned man about Percy’s age, who wore a knit sweater over his collared shirt—craned his neck to look at the sound of money hitting the countertop.

“That’s seventy-eight cents,” said the bartender.

“Is that a lot? It sounds like a lot.”

“First time in the country?” asked the man to his left.

Percy nodded. “This is my very first stop, in fact.”

The patron turned to the bartender and said, with an imploring smirk, “Come on, Lou! The man comes from god knows where and picks your shitty bar of all places.”

Several long seconds passed as the bartender eyed him suspiciously. Finally, he said, “First one’s on the house, foreigner. Welcome to New York.”

The beer was pretty good. Percy sipped it slowly, aware of how little effort it would take to get him drunk right now. He must have eaten at some point in the supposed weeks he was semiconscious (and apparently combative, if he had read between the lines correctly), but the shakiness in his limbs told him that he hadn’t eaten at least today. Or had any water. While he drank, the neighbor to his left enjoyed his own pint, then asked to close his tab. When Lou the bartender rang him up, the man set several familiar green papers on the table.

“Oh, I’ve got some of those!” Percy said. 

He fished them out of the coin purse and set them on the table. Both Lou and the man looked at the papers, then at one another.

“What country doesn’t have paper currency?” the man said, confused.

“It’s a small place. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“Try me.”

“Tal’Dorei,” ventured Percy.

“Nope. Never heard of it.” The man did not seem to notice Percy’s disappointment. “Really, no paper money though?”

When Percy shook his head, the man turned back to the bartender.

“One more stout for me.”

“You’re gonna miss class again, Zack,” Lou warned.

“I can’t let a guy wander around the city not knowing how money works! He’ll be broke in an hour.”

“He’s already broke,” said Lou, gesturing to the money. 

“Am I?” Percy said.

He was. The fellow called Zack lined the coins up on the counter, along with one of the bills featuring an old man with an interesting hair style, and explained the denominations. 

“Okay, see here, uh—what’s your name, friend?” Zack gave him a searching look.

“Call me Freddy,” Percy said, on impulse.

“Freddy! Look, Freddy, you think of the dollar as your baseline. All the coins are just a fraction of the dollar, which is just one hundred cents.”

“Shouldn’t you start with cents?” said Lou, from where he was wiping down the far end of the counter.

Zack waved him off. “No, this way is better. Okay, look here. The quarter—” he slid the large coin across, “is a quarter of one dollar. Twenty-five cents.”

“Well that’s intuitive.”

Zach waved a finger. “Ehh, you’ll see. The next one down is a dime, which is a tenth of a dollar. The nickel is next, which is half a dime, or a twentieth of a dollar. Then the penny, which is basically worthless at one hundredth of one dollar.”

As he described each coin, he pointed it out in the lineup. 

“So, a penny is one cent?” Percy said.

“You got it.”

“So I suppose my only real question is... how many dollars for a drink?”

Zack and Lou both laughed, taken aback. 

“In the city? Five for a shitty one,” Lou said. “You’re drinking a seven-fifty right now.”

“Seven hundred and fifty cents, I hope you mean.” Seven hundred and fifty dollars, and he was like to starve out here.

“Seven dollars and fifty cents,” said Zack. “But yeah. Pretty good price for midtown, to be honest.”

Percy flipped through the paper bills, counting them all up in his head.

“All right,” he said. “I’m not in such terrible shape then, am I? I’ve got about sixty dollars right here. How many dollars for something to eat?”

“Basic burger is thirteen.”

“Again, shitty price, but not bad for a homemade patty this part of town,” Zack said.

“Very well.” Percy counted out thirteen dollars. “Thirteen for your... basic burger, please.”

“Plus twenty percent for tip,” Zack said in a false whisper. “Don’t forget to tip!”

Percy gave him a strange look, but nevertheless set the additional two dollars and sixty cents down with the original thirteen. 

“And tax. On the original amount, not the tipped amount.”

“Tax—?”

“What’s the sales tax now, Lou?” 

“Bit over eight percent now.”

Despite the feeling that someone was shaking him down, Percy added the extra money to the pile.

“There you go, Freddy. A natural!” Zack clapped him on the shoulder. “And if you find the right spot, you should even have enough left to get yourself a pair of shoes.”

“Shoes—?”

Grimly, Percy dropped his chin and realized, for the first time, that the only thing on his feet was a pair of black socks. So he hadn’t gotten himself quite as put together as he thought.

* * *

In hindsight, Percy suspected that if he picked any random direction and started walking, he would have found a library. According to the man named Zack, the public library alone had something like forty branches scattered throughout the city. That didn’t count all of the university libraries (such as the one Zack frequented), the public school libraries, and the more niche libraries owned by private institutions and religious organizations. By that account, there were more libraries within this ten mile radius than he had ever visited in all his life. Were he not desperately confused, he may have wept for joy.

Percy had learned quite a bit while he ate his burger (a greasy, heavy thing, yet tasty), but he had been too afraid of seeming insane to ask many follow-up questions. Instead, he’d just let Zack go on (and he really did go on) and forced himself to eat, and tried to passively absorb as much information as he could. The things he learned concerned him, because they were completely unfamiliar. He recognized not a single place that Zack referenced, nor any of the public figures. Zack hadn’t mentioned the arcane, either. Making his way westward, Percy passed a handful of churches and saw not a single familiar god.

The library stacks were at least somewhat akin to what he knew, but the information inside them was not. One of the librarians pointed him to the section on world history and left him standing there with his mouth hanging open at the countless stacks. Too impatient for answers to consult the directory, he took down the closest book and began to read. 

“ _. . . Thoreau’s decision to go to Walden in 1845 was not the result of one change, but of many social, economic, and spiritual factors. In part, Thoreau’s decision was a reaction against his day’s social and economic trends. His Concord was in the midst of an agricultural turnover, where the farmer’s comfortable practices began to give way to the pressures of a national economy. The railroad’s delivery of various supplies from the West allowed these farmers to branch off and begin practicing other methods of farming, such as fruit raising. . .”_

Percy thumbed to the back and skimmed through the index. No mention of Tal’dorei, Wildemount, Vasselheim. But was it a different place, or simply a different time...? 

He spent the next several minutes reading titles on the spines until he finally found an atlas. Inside was more of the same unfamiliar territory, but it confirmed at least one thing: somehow, he had wound up on the wrong plane of existence. How he had gotten here was a complete mystery, but there it was. 

The revelation settled onto Percy’s chest, weighty and dense. He was on the wrong plane of existence. He had no knowledge about this plane’s rules, and no druid to pop him back into the right one. He had next to no money, no weapons (or knowledge as to whether he was likely to need a weapon), and nowhere to go. In short, he had nothing. 

Well... not nothing. Percy closed the heavy cover of the atlas and turned around, slowly, to face the rows and rows. He took a long breath and reached for the next book.

Several hours went by like this. At some point during the countless minutes, he realized that the language he was reading—and _comprehending_ —was not any language he’d seen or read before. It briefly sent him reeling, but not even that was enough to pull him from the mission. Percy pulled down book after book and skimmed through for anything helpful. At first he started with recent history, but it was too much to take in. Instead of learning anything about this world, he found himself failing to absorb anything. So Percy then started over from the beginning. The very, very beginning. 

A lot of that history seemed a bit speculative, but at least it gave a little foundation. There were seven or five continents, depending on who you asked. He was in a sort of temperate-zone, climate wise, and close to the ocean. Oddly, all of the texts seemed to assume that humans were the only species to speak of, and none mentioned magic or an established pantheon of gods. He hadn’t gotten to the part where the humans figured out how to provide all of this seemingly sourceless overhead lighting, but he hoped to get there soon. 

This part of the library was nearly vacant. Off in some other part of the enormous building, like background noise, he could hear the mingled voices of other library patrons, the occasional laugh or shriek of children. Percy thought of his four at home, each of them a manifestation of his heart outside his body. Here in the unknown, it gave him the loneliest feeling. He pushed it aside before it could intrude any further.

Percy paced the long rows back and forth, cradling each open book in one hand while running a finger over the lines. His feet were aching in the shoes he’d gotten at the thrift store on his way over, using a simple map that Zack had drawn on the blank side of a napkin. The only shoes he could afford that even pretended to fit had been a pair of laced boots that were just a little too small. The old black canvas was faded, and the laces frayed at the ends, but the rubber soles had not worn through. It was better than wandering around in his socks. 

He had just finished skimming through a section on the Roman aqueducts (a brilliant concept) when the librarian returned for the first time.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we’re closing for the night.”

Percy jolted at the sudden voice, which in turn made the librarian do the same.

“Oh! I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to scare you,” the librarian said, as Percy straightened his glasses.

“No, no, it’s not you. Are you open tomorrow?”

“Yes, from eight ‘till six.”

While she was walking off, Percy grabbed the smallest book he could find and stuffed it into his coat for a bit more reading until he could return. On his way through the exit, an alarm went off, at which point Percy learned that the library card actually allowed him to take out books without stealing them. Sheepishly, he reported to the counter and the clerk checked it out for him.

Percy had spent so much time thinking on what he would do to get home that he hadn’t considered what he would do _today_ , when he was escorted from the safety of the halls at closing time. On some level, he thought he’d have woken up by now.

Night had fallen, but the city was far from dark. People were still walking about as if it were mid-day, and the lights shining from all the windows cast enough of a glow to pass for twilight. The last few stragglers from the library milled out around him, disbursing into the crowd. Nearby at the top of the stairs, a father knelt to tuck the ends of his toddler’s scarf into her coat before picking her up and heading off with the others. He watched them go, and wondered what his family was up to. Julia was too young to understand that something had happened, but the rest would know. Assuming that they were on a parallel time line, and he hadn’t launched himself into the future or the past, and time wasn’t standing still back home. There were a lot of assumptions to be made, and no way of knowing which was the most, or least, likely. 

Percy zipped his jacket up to the chin and began to walk once more. He had about twenty dollars left after the meal and the shoes. It wasn’t enough for a room at an inn, but any sort of indoor place would do, and this seemed like the kind of town where things were open after midnight.

Sure enough, he found an indoor bazaar after less than a mile of walking. Inside, there were more shops with wide, sleek doorframes and shiny windows showcasing their wares—clothing, mostly. Some odds and ends he didn’t have the present curiosity to investigate. Percy found a place to sit in the part of the bazaar where all the food vendors were set up, after looking at each of the vendor’s menus and internally despairing over the prices. He told himself that all he had to do was get through to morning, and then he’d find something cheaper to eat elsewhere. 

He found a table, and for a time, blended in nicely with the rotating crowd of people who came and went with friends and trays of food. He pulled out the book from inside his coat, and groaned to find that the book he’d blindly grabbed was _Beard and Brawn: A History of Facial Hair_.

Percy started the book, attention divided between the words on the page and the excerpts of conversation happening around him. The smells were distracting, too. The burger and drink seemed like they happened days ago. Every time someone sat at an adjacent table, he found himself watching them out of the corner of his eye and had to pull his focus away from the hollow feeling in his gut. 

His half-baked plan worked for a little while, until after a few hours of intermittent reading, listening, and standing to stretch and pace around, he fell asleep at his table. Percy woke again to someone shaking his shoulder—an acne-faced teen wearing a smock and wielding a broom.

“Sorry, the mall’s closed.”

So out went Percy, back into the cold to find another place to wait. The lights out here were still comparatively bright, and the noise was incessant, but the crowds had thinned out. He even found himself alone for a block or two at a time, the further west he went. It was on one of these rare stretches of isolated walkway where someone grabbed him.

Percy had been passing one of a thousand unremarkable alleyways when it happened. He ought to have heard the noise, but he had been too busy trying to read the text on a church sign across the street. The hand clamped down over his mouth and jerked him backwards into the alley. Out of pure habit, Percy’s hand moved straight to his holster which, of course, was not there. 

It didn’t matter anyhow. There were two of them, and they’d gotten the jump on him. The first person—the one with a hand pressing painfully into Percy’s jaw—whipped him sideways, away from the lights and the view of the road, with enough force to pull him momentarily off of his feet. While Percy was scrambling to break the first person’s grip on him, the second one appeared and whacked him with something hard, right in the soft spot at the base of his ribcage. The shock shot through his gut, and had he not been trapped in the arms of the first person, he’d have bent over double.

“Quit—struggling—!”

The voice in his ear sounded strained, as though surprised that Percy was resisting. Percy couldn’t see in the darkness, but he felt the ground beneath his new-used shoes and dug in, forcing himself and his assailant back until the latter came up against the brick wall. Hot air blew over his neck as the breath escaped from the person holding onto him. The grip loosened slightly, and Percy had just about wiggled free when the second person grabbed a fistful of his hair. Percy was yanked sideways and, still dizzy from the hit to his solar plexus, didn’t have time to react when the ground came up to meet his face. 

His head hit the ground, hard. His glasses flew off somewhere out of view. The second person had Percy laid out flat on his stomach, his right arm twisted and held behind his back. 

“Now, Kenny! I got him,” said the second person.

A sound of scrambling followed as the first person—Kenny, apparently—rushed over to help. He had recovered from being slammed against the wall, except for the slight wheeze to his breath. Percy felt as Kenny’s hands began patting him down. His left arm was stuck at an awkward angle against his chest, and when he tried to push himself up, he couldn’t budge the weight of the first person. Prone and pinned down, with blood in his mouth, Percy moved on to diplomacy, which would have been ‘Plan A’ had he had a moment to intervene. 

He craned his neck to steal a look at his assailants. “Now hang on—” he began.

Still kneeling on the middle of his back, the first person pressed something cold against Percy’s cheek, grinding his face into the gravel.

“Don’t fucking move,” said the person.

Then there was a sound. It was different than what he knew, but somehow, it was the most recognizable thing he’d seen or heard on this entire plane: the familiar sound of a bullet sliding into the barrel.

The realization was paralyzing. Percy felt as though he had fallen through ice while crossing a river. The fear evaporated as adrenaline began to hum through him. 

“What is that?” he breathed.

Kenny’s voice came over his right shoulder. “It’s a gun, dumbass.”

“Shut up. You find his wallet?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

The roaming hands had found the front pocket of Michael’s coat. Percy didn’t struggle as Kenny fumbled around his midsection, dug into the pocket, and withdrew again. 

“I need to ask you something,” said Percy.

“Shut up,” said the man with the gun.

“It’s important,” he insisted.

“Twenty bucks, really?” Kenny said. “Two debit cards, though. What’s the PIN number for those?”

The person pushed the muzzle into Percy’s face so hard that he was sure his teeth would cut the inside of his cheek. “What’s the PIN number for the cards?”

Percy had no idea what a PIN number was, but he answered, “I’ll tell you if you answer my question.”

“The fuck’s your question?”

“When was the gun invented?”

There was a long pause. From the corner of his eye, he saw the pale, unfocused face of the second man give what must have been a perplexed look over to his partner.

“I dunno,” he said eventually. “Forever, I think.”

“Maybe like three hundred years?” said Kenny. “They had them in the revolutionary war—what?”

Percy had begun to laugh. It started off quietly, more like a cough, but as the lunacy of the truth sank into his brain, it began to spill out from his mouth. 

In this world, he had nothing. He was nothing. His past was a fiction, hardly even a fantasy. He’d never fought a war, won a battle, bartered his soul. His best friend, his partner in everything, had never existed. He could hear her voice in his head. He could feel her there beside him, even now, but she wasn’t real. Their four sweet, perfect children had never been born. The universe had wiped them all from the face of his existence. 

But at least he hadn’t invented the gun.

The resistance lifted away from his face as the man pulled back in alarm. Free to move, Percy convulsed inward, the laughter shaking him as it cracked. He paid no mind to the anxious conversation happening in front of him. By the time the man scrambled to his feet, Percy was howling.

“Hey, be quiet! Listen!”

The man was shaking the gun in his face, making demands. Percy heard the words, but only in the abstract. This place was all too much. It had everything and nothing. Percy saw the backswing as the hand with the gun went into the air. He was almost grateful when it came back down on him. The hard crack against his jaw was mercy, and the quiet that followed was the hollowest peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Percy de Rolo: level 20 fighter, level 1 New Yorker. I feel like if you are going to do the "character ends up in NYC by accident" trope, then you pretty much have to go all the way and have them almost get nailed by a cab. 
> 
> I am at that Certain Age where I still want all of my favorite characters to suffer, but I also want them to be happy because I have grown Soft and Tired. I started this in October, when the idea for a fun little story popped into my head. I wanted it to be super short, pure plotless angst with a happy ending, but stupidly, I picked a premise that requires a little more development to feel fulfilling. So I got this instead. Things in the world are fucking terrible right now, so I hope you can enjoy some fic.
> 
> I wrote almost all of this fic with my THUMBS on my CELL PHONE, usually while traveling for work, or in the evenings after work with my last two brain cells. Which means that a lot of the work for future chapters is fixing the eight thousand typos and auto-correct. But the good news is that it'll get done. Scout's honor. 
> 
> Anyway, if you've made it to this point, I hope you'll join me as we move forward. And if you're havin' a good time here, let me know! I'd love to hear your thoughts.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Week two of Critical Role quarantine hiatus. Are we all just posting/reading fic to fill our collective Thursday void?

Chapter 2

An hour had passed since the others ventured into the forest, but Percy wasn’t worried. They were in the best possible hands.

The last morning of their trip had greeted them with ideal traveling conditions. But to those under the age of six, this kind of clear, crisp weather was only good for berry picking. Percy had hovered at the back door of the inn and watched the four of them leave with their cloth-and-wicker baskets—five if you counted the bear, which Vex always did. Their feet cut paths that meandered in the dewy grass as they ran, and the excited shrieking carried on for a while after they disappeared into the trees. It drowned out Vex’s orders to keep together, hold hands, stay quiet or you’ll scare off all the deer. 

By the time they came back, the cart would be packed up and ready to receive them for the last leg of the journey home. In the meantime, it left Percy and the baby to their morning routine. 

This inn wasn’t Percy’s favorite, but it was the best place to stop on the way back up the Alabaster Trail. The innkeeper knew them by now, which helped, and she had good taste in choosing from the bands that shuffled through the town. Last night, the flute and violin duo had played long into the dark hours, drawing a considerable crowd that entertained the children until one by one, they passed out at the table after playing and dancing to the music. As the de Rolo lot came thudding down the stairs the morning after, they found a handful of patrons still slumped in their seats. One still had a tankard in his hand. A strong tobacco smell clung to the air from a dozen snuffed-out pipes.

The barmaid was wide awake, though, and had a mug of coffee waiting for him on the counter. Julia was, as usual, still drowsy after breakfast. Percy bundled her up and brought her outside with him to escape from the residual smoke cloud. The inn’s vacant yard had a few large wooden chairs and some less sturdy card tables scattered about. Percy claimed the chair furthest from the door; someone had knocked it over, so he flipped it back upright with his boot, taking care not to spill his drink. There, in a rare moment of quiet, he drank his coffee (hot, for once) and caught up on some reading while the baby dozed. She was a warm, sleepy weight on his chest in the cool weather. Absently, Percy cradled her head into the crook of his shoulder while he read. 

Time passed slowly on vacation as a general rule, and Percy enjoyed the hour and change as it stretched out before him. The background to his reading was the near-silent breeze at the edge of the Parchwood, and the occasional thud of their belongings being tossed unceremoniously into the cart. Eventually, little voices in the distance signaled the end of the quiet. Julia was fully awake by then, anyway, and would soon grow impatient. He set his book aside.

“Let’s see what they’ve been up to, shall we?” 

Hoisting her up in one arm, Percy set off across the wide, sloping yard. He was halfway down when the picking party emerged from the line of trees. Vesper appeared first at a full run, followed by Illia, who wasn’t quite steady enough to keep up—berries rained from her basket as she bounced along, all smiles and no regard for the fact that half the fruit would be on the ground by the time she reached him. Vex came up last alongside Trinket, who had Percival sitting between his shoulder blades, looking huffy. 

“Look, Julie, look!” Illia cried, once she finally reached them. She brandished her half-empty basket, her hands and mouth purple with juice. “We got berries!”

Percy set the baby down so Illia could show off her spoils. Julia could almost stand up on her own now, but she kept a grip on his leg to balance on the uneven ground. The hand that wasn’t clutching his trousers went straight into the basket, squashed a fistful of berries, and flung them over Illia’s shoulder.

“Daddy, momma says we picked half the berries in the forest!” Vesper said proudly.

“Is that so?” Percy said, impressed. “We should be glad the birds can’t write, then. Otherwise we’d be dealing with some strongly-worded letters.”

“Mama talked to the birds. They said it was okay!”

Vex had caught up with them by then. Her cheeks were flush with cold and the effort of corralling the party. “The real question is, will the sugar wear off in time for everyone to nap on the road, or will they wait until tonight to crash?”

Percy grinned at her. “Oh, they’ll wait. The ride home is much too exciting.” Even he always felt a rush when the topmost peaks of Whitestone castle first appeared around the cliffs. For the children, the sight was a near crisis of celebration.

The girls went tearing off toward the inn to tell the innkeeper about their adventure, with little Percival calling after for then to slow down and wait for him and Trinket. Percy watched them over his shoulder while Vex knelt, scooped up the baby, and kissed her on the cheek. 

“And how were you, little darling?” she said, as Julia laughed and grabbed a handful of hair that had come loose from Vex’s braid, leaving a smudge of berry juice. “Did you give your father lots of trouble, or did you save it all for me?”

“She was perfect, honestly,” Percy confessed. “Almost too good—it makes me wonder where she came from, because it can’t have been us.”

“That’s funny, because I could have sworn I was there when she was born, and I seem to remember Pike dubbing her a ‘pointy-eared de Rolo.’”

“Technically, they’re all pointy-eared de Rolos,” said Percy. “This one just happens to bear a family resemblance. Finally.”

Vex chuckled at that. She leaned in and kissed him, softly. Her lips were cool against his, and the hum she gave at the warmth of his touch almost made him shiver. There was a faint sweetness, the tang of blackberry. Percy let his hand find its way to her face. He ran a thumb across her cheekbone and found his way to his favorite place at the nape of her neck. When she eased away, their mingled breath rose between them as a fine mist in the air.

“If she isn’t enough chaos for you, what do you say to one more?” Vex said, smirking as she passed the infant back to Percy.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Is that a challenge? Or are you telling me something?”

She shrugged, but the gesture was allusive. “I have a suspicion, but it’s too soon to tell.”

They started back up the hill. The arm that Percy wasn’t using to balance the baby on his hip found its way around Vex’s waist. Vex leaned into him, content. She smoothed out his shirt at the small of his back, up his spine, towards his shoulder blade. 

“Well,” Percy said cheerfully, after a thoughtful pause, “five does present a brand new sort of challenge.”

Vex tipped her chin toward him. “How do you mean?”

“For starters, we only have four arms between us.”

“As if we could get them all in one place at the same time,” Vex laughed. Then her expression became pensive. “That’ll be impossible once we’re back in Whitestone and they’re not our little captives anymore.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Percy said, almost wistfully. “That’s one reason why I like these little trips so much. It’s a shame Cass needs us tomorrow morning.”

“What is it, love?" Vex teased at the sound of his sigh. "Not desperate to get back to politics and your clock tower just yet?”

Ordinarily by this point on a trip, after weeks away from home, he’d be itching to work. Something about this time had been different, though. Vesper, Illia, and Percival were finally old enough to make good company for one another, and he had enjoyed watching them learn and play together. They had an infectious silliness about them, an incessant sense of wonder over every new thing. And Julia was still in that clingy, cuddly phase. 

The concept of a big, happy family had been an abstract remembrance, more like a theory or a craving than something he’d lived. As he watched the three older children and the bear disappear through the doorway, Percy tried to stow the feeling of this moment deep into his memory, knowing he’d look back it one day and desperately wish he’d had more time here.

“It goes by so quickly,” he said, at last. “I wish we could have just one more day.”

“— _Frederick—?_ ” a voice cut through his head.

Percy kept his eyes closed tight, clinging to the image. If he didn’t open them or acknowledge the voice, he could still feel Julia’s weight on his arm and Vex’s hand between his shoulders. And yet, even as he sensed these things, and fought to hold them there, they began to recede.

The voice pinged him again, unwelcome but incessant. “Can you hear me, Frederick?”

No use. Percy blinked back into consciousness to find himself back in bed, lying propped up on a reclining mattress. He was back in the place with shiny white floors and the oppressive ceiling lights, and like last time, he was not alone. Sitting there by his knee was Dr. Hernandez with her clipboard, her posture tilted forward, as if she had been studying him for some time.

“Were you dreaming?” she asked, more inquisitive than concerned. 

Percy brushed a finger beneath his glasses to smudge away the wetness before it could accumulate into something visible.

“No,” he said firmly. “I was remembering.”

And now, a different kind of memory slinked in. Something far away from his home and his real life. He had been on the ground with someone else’s knee pinning his hand behind his back. A gun against his face, first as a threat, then as a blunt strike. Percy rubbed his jaw. It felt swollen on the left side, with a bone-tender ache that traveled partway down his neck and up into his cheek. When he ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth, he felt something bulky there.

“Six stitches, and that’s lucky,” said Hernandez, as Percy stuck a finger in his mouth to investigate the neat row of sutures inside his bottom lip. “Nobody found you until almost noon. If it was January, you’d have frozen to death overnight and you’d be on your way to Hart Island.”

“What is that?” he said, though it was nearly unintelligible between his finger and the swelling.

She gave him a suspicious look. “It’s where they bury the people who die and nobody claims—are you really telling me you don’t know _anything_ about this city?”

While unconscious, Percy had slid so that he was half-sitting, half lying down. Pushing himself back upright, he straightened his glasses and looked back at the doctor with a renewed intensity.

“You seem to think you know more about me than I do,” he said stiffly. “Tell me what I’m supposed to know.”

“Central Park?”

“No.”

“The Statue of Liberty?”

“Never heard of it.”

“The Empire State Building?”

“No.”

“... pizza?”

“Is that a monument as well?”

“Wow,” said Hernandez, blowing out a sigh. “Hmm.”

“What?”

“Your case is—well.” As if suddenly recalling their respective positions, she sat up straight and picked the clipboard up from where it lay beside her on the bed. “You’re owed an explanation, but we haven’t been able to do a full assessment yet, and I don’t want to prime you before we do that. Would you mind if I asked you some questions first? And then I promise afterward, I’ll answer all of yours?”

Percy _did_ mind. But she was sounding civil, and acting on his own hadn’t gotten him very far last time, so he didn’t object. 

He sat obediently as Hernandez shined a light into his eyes, asked him to track it left and right and up and down. He answered some simple math questions, and when she handed him a sheet on her clipboard with more complex ones, he answered those too. He suspected she was rushing through these more formulaic parts in order to get to something more interesting. That theory proved correct when, after he handed back the sheet of equations, she flipped right over to the next page instead of reading to see if he’d done them right.

“So.” Despite what he assumed to be her best efforts, Hernandez looked almost excited. “Since you left before I could explain it last time, I’m the resident assigned to your case. You’re at New York Central, in the Center for Critical Neurology. It’s the care unit for patients with acute memory loss.” When Percy continued to stare blankly, she continued, “We did several scans while you were in and out of it, but obviously, we never got to ask you the routine questions.”

Hernandez touched the tip of her pen to her tongue. “Let’s start simple. Tell me your whole name.”

“Percival Frederickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo the Third.”

The pen had been poised just above the surface of the paper, ready to write, but she faltered as he rattled out the name. She seemed to consider the short space where the name was meant to go. “Let’s just—the first and the last ones of what you just said. I caught ‘Percival.’”

“de Rolo.”

“Percival de Rolo. How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-two.”

“Well, at least we’re on the same page about one thing,” she said, making a note. “Where were you born?”

“Whitestone, in the northern part of Tal’dorei…”

She asked him the names of his parents, his siblings, and an open-ended question about his other family members, in which he identified Vex and each of their four children. As he did, the memory of what Vex had suggested to him flitted painfully through his head. That was just yesterday, wasn’t it? They’d arrived back home, had dinner with his sister, taken on the nightly routine. He’d gone to bed with Vex and woken up somewhere else.

He had left her there alone—all of them. His wife, his children, his friends, his sister. Not on purpose, and not willingly, but he had. It was even possible, if not probable, that they might have been caught up in this, too. Their being on this plane was actually one of the least offensive possibilities. But it was more than he could stand, so he shirked it and focused on answering the doctor’s rapid-fire questions instead.

Dr. Hernandez’s face didn’t reveal a thought as Percy laid out what must have sounded like total insanity. She read off the sheet, made a note or two, scanned indifferently through the pages. Mostly she just listened, not meeting his eye. After he finished explaining the various ancestors that comprised his long name, she stood and tucked her clipboard under an arm.

“If I leave the room for a few minutes, will you stay here?” she asked, face blank.

“Yes,” Percy said. If he was able to get any helpful answers from her, he’d have already learned more than yesterday. 

When Hernandez returned, she was carrying a brown box, which she set on the bedside. Balanced on top was a thick blue folder. 

“Your personal belongings,” she said, patting the top of the box. She passed him the folder. “Your file.”

Inside was the life of someone he had never met. Flipping through the pages, Percy would have assumed that he was simply reading the history of a stranger. A man named Frederick Zimmerman with no known living relatives, little-known medical history, and high blood pressure. The thing was, the folder also had several depictions of his likeness—photographs, as he had learned yesterday at the library—and that was hard to dispute. There he was, on a hospital bed with a bandage over his head and partly covering one eye. 

Dr. Hernandez began to fill in the details, eyeing him as he studied the pictures. “The hospital found an ID badge from where you worked, so they called to get contact information for a family member. Your boss—former boss—said they didn’t have any in your file. They also said that you’d been fired on the date of the accident, and you stormed out without any of your stuff.”

“Tried to off myself, did I?” Percy said impassively, not drawing his attention from a record discussing the unusual color of his hair. Now that he knew he was reading in a different language, he found himself paying attention to the words themselves. He knew each and every letter by its name.

“Your boss did seem a little concerned about that. But a witness said you were just walking in the crosswalk when the driver ran the light. Do you have a history of depression?”

“No,” Percy answered, which wasn’t technically a lie so much as the full extent of the truth required far more context than he was prepared to give. He had a suspicion she wouldn’t believe the part about Orthax and the murder of his entire family anyway. “And what was my employment? Ambassador to a foreign land? Head architect of a massive city undertaking?”

Percy had taken mental notes on some of the building designs he’d seen while walking about before someone tried to smash his teeth in. On principal, he detested the city and rejected everything the plane had to offer. It didn’t stop the mish-mash of architecture from catching his attention.

“You were a customer service representative at a telephone company.”

“Customer service?” he said, in unintentional disgust. “That doesn’t sound right.”

“Your boss said you were fired for condescending the regional manager who was in the office for a quality assurance inspection.”

“That... does sound more like it.”

As he continued to skim the pages in search of something persuasive, Percy found a record with a date, but he’d forgotten the order of the months here. 

“When was all of this, anyway? When did this happen?”

“About a month ago now. In fact—” Hernandez checked her notes, “a month tomorrow.”

“A month,” he said, taken aback. “Did you—did you and the other doctor—doctor Miller, actually _see_ me then?”

She nodded. “You only came to our unit once you were medically stable. This would have been two weeks ago. But we got called in early because you came-to and didn’t respond to your own name.”

“I don’t remember any of that,” he said warily.

“Yes well...” Hernandez trailed off, as if to say that she didn’t place much value on his recall of the past few weeks. 

“And I didn’t wake up until yesterday?” he pressed.

“Oh no, you were awake at times. Just... a difficult patient.”

“How do you mean?” Percy took care to keep the edge out of his voice.

Hernandez had begun to fidget. Percy couldn’t tell whether she was uncomfortable because she was lying, or because she was afraid how he might react to her honesty. “You were just… you lashed out whenever someone got close to you. Physically, I mean. You didn’t know anything, except that you appeared to be frightened. We had to keep you more sedated than we liked. It was necessary.”

Dr. Hernandez gave him time to process that, and waited for him to look upset about it. Percy kept his neutral expression and said nothing.

“It’s so odd,” she said, in a voice that sounded almost confiding. She looked past him, thinking hard, the pen twirling around in her fingers. “We would anticipate some short term memory loss after a traumatic head injury. And in rare cases, people sometimes do take on alternative identities. But you don’t fit neatly into that profile. And your current behavior doesn’t match up with what the people who knew you seemed to think about you.”

“Who? What people?”

“Your coworkers, mostly. We hired someone to locate your family so we could tell them about the accident and get your medical history, but you… don’t have any.”

Percy flipped to the back of the folder, which featured more photographs, including a close-up of bruising on his chest and neck and arm. He looked closer at the picture, searching for anything out of place, but aside from the new injuries, everything looked much the same—

The same. Percy closed the records folder and weighed it in his hands.

He would soon reach a point where he had to decide how to proceed on this plane in his dealings with other people. As far as he could surmise, he had two main options. The first was to challenge everything that anyone said about him, and continue to insist that he was an implant from a magical realm in another dimension. Tempting, but likely to land him someplace where he wouldn’t have access to the resources he needed now—freedom, time, and information. The alternative was to accept the role of Frederick Zimmerman, or at least the version of him that had every right to be profoundly confused. Percy suspected he knew which side he had to err on, but Hernandez seemed at least open to hearing him.

“If I may,” he said, moving to the edge of the bed. 

She stepped back to give him space to stand. Percy pulled the end of his shirt out from its neat tuck in his waistband, and lifted it to navel height. Some minor bruising still covered his left side, with a scabbed-over scrape on his hip. More interesting was the trophy Reishan had left him in the form of a long, hairline scar that ran vertically up his midsection, from groin to diaphragm. Percy traced it with his fingertips, wondering. 

“If I am really this sad, sorry customer service representative, then how do we explain all of this?” He first pointed to the circular scar in the center of his stomach, then turned around to display the exit wound. “How have I been shot clean through the middle, and not died?”

Then he pulled his shirt up around his shoulders to show her the canvas on his back. All the old scars were there—the adventuring wounds, mostly healed quick enough to prevent serious markings. And the older ones, too. Remnants of endless days in the dungeon of Whitestone castle, where he’d suffered under the cold, dispassionate judgment of Anna Ripley and her implements. Lashes, scrapes, and burns. Long and short, jagged and narrow. Percy let Hernandez have a long look before he dropped his shirt back down and turned around to face her.

Percy picked up the folder again and held it up to her. “This reads like the file of a person who never left his five-block radius,” he said. “How can it be me?”

Hernandez seemed to struggle with the question, until eventually she shrugged. “I don’t know you,” she said, consulting her clip board. “I can’t say what you did before. We weren’t able to find answers to those marks from your treating providers.”

The frustration mounted. Her accepted version of reality made no sense, and yet, to someone who had no other frame of possibility, it was the only one she had. In any event, Percy was still too confused to be properly angry, and his eventual anger needed a real target. Someone was responsible for this. Someone had ripped him from his family and put him in this hospital.

“I have a question for you,” Percy said, as he set the folder back into the box. “Who do you work for?”

Hernandez cocked her head, meeting his gaze at last. She had dark eyes, warm and brown and calculating. Percy felt entirely exposed before her—yet somehow not threatened. Considering the vague sense of hostility he had about everything here, he accepted the instinct.

“I’m—I don’t work for one person. I’m employed by the hospital system.”

“Which is?”

“New York Central.”

Percy stared her in the face for several long seconds, searching for the lie. Hernandez didn’t look away. Her posture slouched with the air of constant fatigue to match the dark smudges under her eyes. She had her red-brown hair tied loosely at the back of her head, but it was not long enough to keep the wavy strands in the front from falling against her chin. She had a tired, honest face. Percy relented. Someone had brought him here, but it wasn’t her. He would figure it out soon enough.

Percy patted the folder where it lay in the box. “Can I keep this?”

Hernandez nodded. “I made that copy for you—I thought it might help you remember. There’s a few other things here that might interest you...”

Percy watched as she began to dig through it. Someone from work had dropped off the personal belongings he’d left there when he ran off to get run over by a car. They included a “gym bag” with shorts, sneakers, and a clean change of clothes—a grey hooded sweater, and a pair of jeans like he’d seen most people wearing out on the street. He rubbed the hem of the jeans between his thumb and forefinger, feeling fabric that was softer and less rigid than it looked.

“Your phone was crushed in the accident,” Hernandez said, while he was inspecting the clothes and wondering at Frederick’s lack of fashion sense. He had been on this plane for less than a day, and already had a better notion of how one ought to dress than Frederick. “You had this old thing in your desk. They didn’t actually know whether it was yours, but nobody else claimed it, so it is now.”

She passed him a rectangular item a bit longer than his palm. It had a glassy screen and a circular emblem in the center, with a few white wires dangling from one end. When he flipped it over, he saw the word “iPod” etched into the back. Before he could ask what it was, she had uncovered something he did recognize: a wallet. _His_ wallet—the leather unfolded in his palm to display a small photograph of his own neutral expression. The name Frederick Zimmerman was printed there on the “driver’s license” with an address. He also found eighteen dollars. 

“Is this really all the money I had?” he asked, again disappointed in the alternate universe version of himself. Perhaps Vex’s alternate was out there in the city somewhere, strutting triumphantly about with all of his money. If so, it shouldn’t be too hard to find her.

“I don’t know. I assume you have a bank account somewhere. Is there a debit card in the wallet?”

There was. Percy also found a library card, which was at least a little reassuring. The sight of it rekindled the sense of urgency that had been dormant in his chest.

“Can I go now?” he asked suddenly. 

Hernandez’s head shot up from where she had been bent over her clipboard, no doubt writing down his reaction to everything he’d done today.

“Don’t you have questions for me?” she said.

“You’ve told me what I need to know.” 

“Listen, Frederick, I don’t recommend leaving just yet. We don’t understand the cause of your symptoms, and you might benefit from some counseling—”

“I’m not interested in any of that. I want to go home.”

“Home, as in—?”

“This place,” Percy lied, and pointed to the address on his identification card. “I want to sleep in my own bed. Check on my things. See what I’ve been up to all this time.”

To her merit, she took some convincing, and did seem genuinely concerned for his well-being. Eventually Hernandez agreed to let him leave, but only when he’d gotten her to admit that she had no way of stopping him from going. All Percy had to do was fill out some paperwork and promise to come back if he needed help.

“I really don’t recommend this,” she insisted for the seventh or eighth time. “We haven’t encountered someone with a memory condition like yours. We don’t know the full scope of the risks. Plus, there are some other tests I’d like to run.”

Signing the wrong name felt strange to Percy’s hand. The signature looked almost childish. He scrawled his new name on the last form and pressed it back into her arms. Hernandez resisted taking hold of it.

“I understand your position, as I’ve just indicated on several of your forms.”

“With a little more time, you might make enormous progress—”

“The only thing I’m interested in progressing is myself, out of here. I’m leaving now.”

Hernandez gave him an imploring look, but took the papers back. “Fine. But come back if you have any change of your symptoms. Or if you change your mind about the tests. And remember what I said about the counseling.”

“All right.”

“And if you don’t want to see me for that, then think about this.” Hernandez took a card from her pocket and put it in his box, knowing he wouldn’t have accepted it if she handed it to him. “It’s a group therapy session for people experiencing acute memory loss. They meet a few times a week. You might find it helpful...”

Percy stood. “Thank you.”

Shaking her head, she rose left him to swap into his civilian clothing. The jeans and sweater fit on the loose side. He had to tighten the belt a few notches to keep them from slipping down his waist. As he changed clothes, he noticed his mark from the Slayer’s Take was still on his arm as well. He made a mental note to try to find the symbol at the library. If it meant something on this plane, maybe its origins would lead him somewhere.

He had to get organized. Percy had begun to feel a slight tilt in the back of his brain, as the mounting list of unwritten tasks began to spill over into anxious territory. Percy pulled taut the laces of his shoes—the boots he’d bought yesterday, not the ugly white sneakers—and put the first four tasks in the front of his mind. Figure out where he lived. Figure out where his money was kept. Buy some notebooks. Go to the library.

Once fully dressed and ready to depart, Percy picked up the box and opened the door to leave. Hernandez was still hovering there, now holding a familiar black jacket.

As she draped it over the top of the box in his arms, she said in a nonchalant tone, “Michael says to keep this. You need it more than he does.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, a person with no parental instinct: I would kill for every one of these fictitious children, so help me god.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another Thursday in our collective COVID nightmare without Critical Role. . . sob. . . have some fic.
> 
> (Content warnings below for those who like to skip them for spoiler purposes)
> 
> Content Warnings for this chapter: the usual accoutrement of Deep Angst. Insomnia, depressive/anxious thoughts, unhealthy coping behaviors (including substance misuse and intentional-ish self-harm), dissociation.

Chapter 3

Percy was not an adult when the Briarwoods killed his family. By the time the sailors fished him out of the river, however, he was not a child either. Something had happened in the space between two crucial points in time: the night he awoke to the castle in chaos, and the night he left Cassandra to die in the snow. They had carved it out of him, inch by bleeding inch.

He could not quite remember that person. After he came-to on the deck of the ship, Percy knew that he was someone else, but not anyone he recognized. His personhood took on a malleable quality. He was an orphan with a body like a scratching post. At times he was a mute, a deckhand, a student, a ghost. For the next two years, he simply ceased to exist.

This time was different, though. Percy knew who he was. He was a man who had killed dragons, bartered with demons, pledged his heart in front of a god. He had felt everything the universe had to offer—the immense pain of loss, the thrill of a shot well-aimed. The flow of electricity through the threads of his cloak. The indescribable instant that Pike put a baby in his arms, and he knew for the first time that he had created something perfect. Something _good_.

You couldn’t make that up. You just couldn’t.

* * *

Considering the circumstances, Percy staved it off longer than he could have hoped.

The apartment was so small. Percy had been sure that when the bank teller told him the biggest draw from his account was $2,700 for rent, all of Whitestone would open up before him when he turned the knob. Instead, the place he supposedly lived was a single room with a bed, a desk, and a kitchenette. His Emon workshop wouldn’t have fit inside.

Decades of cigarette smoke effused from the carpeted hallway outside of his unit. A dog barked and whined a few doors down. The noise from outside was too much for a few thin walls to stifle, but here, it became a more muted sort of disorder. Percy stood and surveyed the room, straddling the threshold with one foot in, one foot out. 

It seemed rude to enter someone else’s home unannounced, so Percy called out a curious “Hello?”

Ten seconds passed without a response. Percy stepped inside. The box from the hospital wasn’t heavy, but it was cumbersome, and his arms had grown stiff from carrying it around for hours. He set it on the edge of an end table by the door, and distractedly rubbed the life back into his forearms as he straightened up to appraise the place.

Percy had always worked in an organized state of chaos. He may not have always had control over his work environment while traveling, but every tinkering tool and spare part had its place within his bag. He took pride in the things he created, but wasn’t exactly famous for clinging to material items, either (except for a particular gun, but that had only been because it was enchanted, and so _so_ expensive). This place made him look sloppy and sentimental by comparison. The bed was made up with plain white sheets, tucked so neat that the surface looked perfectly flat from a distance. A large window overlooked the street two floors below. It was the only item of interest on the wall, aside from a few switches that turned the lights on and off. Percy scanned the room for personal effects and saw nothing, other than a wilted plant on the counter.

Percy spent the next hour tearing the place apart. Magic or no, the room would have at least one or two unexpected gems if it really was his. Anything at all that could tie him to this world, or shed a single ounce of insight, would be the first step he needed. He tore the sheets from the bed, flipped the box spring, inspected every stitch on the mattress. When the rug didn’t expose any passageways hidden in the wooden floorboards, he turned to yanking open cabinets and peering behind appliances. 

At last, while running his fingers along the trim on the windowsill, his thumb brushed along an indentation. The frame wiggled, and when he tugged on it, pulled free to reveal a slot in the wall. Percy gasped, chest seizing.

“There you are,” he said to the air, triumphant.

Without pausing to check if it was trapped, he shoved his hand into the narrow space between the sheets of drywall. His arm went in almost up to the elbow. Nothing happened. Percy clawed along the interior, felt up and down and across the bottom. The dusty smell of stale air was the only thing to greet him as he rummaged through. Percy stared in disbelief at his hand upon drawing it back, as if expecting it not to be empty.

He backed away from the window and sat down on the floor. Alone in the center of the upturned room, he pressed his palms against his eyes and tried to pin back the harsh noise that growled out of his throat. 

Answers were out there, he told himself. Somewhere—in a library, in a book, in a person—the solution was waiting for him. Surely. He had altogether too much at stake to start getting impatient this early on. 

* * *

The unyielding clamor outside had the unexpected benefit of masking the ringing in his ears, but it was too loud and varied to serve as white noise. When Percy finally did drift off, he awoke in the middle of the night to a jolt of panic. He sat up to find his nightshirt damp with sweat and his heart hammering. Had he been dreaming? He couldn’t remember.

Shaking his head, he studied the bedroom. A sliver of light pollution had stolen in through the crooked blinds, cutting through the dark. It made him think of the rare clear night in Whitestone, and how the stars shone so bright, he could stay up late and read by their light through the window. For some reason, the memory heightened his sense of alarm, making his pulse quicken. Percy strained his ears, listening for anything out of the ordinary. There was a constant buzz in the night, the sound of the highway far off and below, and nothing else. He realized that he was holding his breath, waiting fruitlessly to hear someone else’s.

The bed was soft but so very empty. Percy lay awake into the longest hours of the night, curled up on his side of the bed, fixated on the vacant space to his left. 

By morning, he had slept for an hour, maybe two. Armed with a fresh notebook and a tin canteen full of black coffee, Percy hit the streets with fervent new energy. The library was an asset, but books and passive staring weren’t going to cut it. So once he had crammed enough knowledge into his head to get by without seeming like an alien to everyone he encountered (which, in a sense, he was), his investigation started in earnest. He had to meet people, trace connections, seek out patterns. He had to dive into the city and unfold it from the inside.

Percy had a strong sense that answers would be where he first began. The Old Man’s Pub had some friendly faces, and he could sit as long as he wanted if he kept his tab open. Lou filled him in on politics and the city’s big players, in the gruff and cynical tone that barkeeps kept for those topics. When Zack was there, Percy listened to the two of them argue about public policy and whether or not “Congress” could find common ground on public infrastructure spending. In different circumstances, Percy might have cared to form an opinion on these things. Right now, all he could do was grip the pint glass in both hands and hang on for the ride. 

Some places were easier to visit than others. The first time Percy reappeared at the hospital—about a week after he shuffled out with his box and stolen coat—he could see that Dr. Hernandez was visibly relieved. The thought of playing along with the lie offended him. He refused to give in to her insistence about his past. But to move things along, he agreed to come by three times a week to discuss his progress and anything else he might want to know.

Walking everywhere from his apartment grew tiresome. Percy quickly learned how to navigate public transportation. And while sitting on the subway on his third full day of consciousness, watching a man stare at his “phone” and adjust the white pieces dangling from his ears, Percy remembered that he had something similar. He didn’t own much, and had taken to carrying all of it in a brown messenger bag he’d found in Frederick’s closet. The little rectangle was tucked in one of the inner pouches, its cord wound around it half a dozen times. Maybe someone had left him a message on it. Percy stuck the end bits in his ears like he’d seen a thousand people do, and clicked the round circle in the center.

Text appeared in a list on the screen, black letters on a grey background: Music. Photos. Videos. Extras. Settings. Shuffle Songs. After figuring out how to scroll through the menus, he read every line of text he could find. Some of it was peculiar, but none sounded like a coded message. Eventually he returned to the main screen and clicked on Shuffle Songs.

Music was everywhere in this world. It rattled out of car windows, warbled from high-up apartment balconies, and walked along with teenagers wearing portable speakers around their necks. The music was usually pre-recorded (again, he was fuzzy on the specifics, and too busy trying to leave this plane to follow up), and when he heard it live (sometimes in the park, on the street, two cars down from where he sat), it left something to be desired. Percy was admittedly a bit spoiled when it came to live performances. This music was different. The earpieces transplanted the sound directly into his head in incredible quality. The drums and the vocals swarmed around him with instruments he couldn’t identify, almost like being charmed… or inspired. He was so taken aback by the all-encompassing sound of it that he didn’t notice the lyrics until well into the second song:

… _baby, I’m hot just like an oven, I need some lovin.’ And baby, I can’t hold it much longer, it’s getting stronger, and stronger…_

The sounds of the subway and its colorful passengers and strange smells tuned out of his consciousness. Percy found himself listening to the entire song and feeling closer to home than he had in days. It staved off the hint of that thing he dreaded most.

* * *

At first, Percy dreamed about them each in turn. He dreamed of Cassandra on her years-long path toward recovery. Most times she was stoic and steadfast, at other times inconsolable with no particular reason to blame. On the rare but delightful occasion, she could be silly. She had adopted her role as doting aunt with more enthusiasm than he’d seen her display for anything. He dreamed of her on the day Vesper was born, when the two of them had watched the tiny sleeping thing wrapped in furs and marveled at the notion of a family member unscathed, unblemished, unspoiled. 

He dreamed of each of his four children and the first time he held them, and the first time they drew breath, and the power of their voices. He dreamed of Keyleth adorning them in flower crowns and teaching them the names of plants and bugs. He dreamed of Grog holding so, so still while they climbed all over him and Pike laughed so hard that she keeled over. He dreamed of Scanlan, looking surprised and proud when little Percival played his first chord on the lute, and of Tary, putting on an elaborate show for them with Doty playing the villain. Percy dreamed of the morning he brought Illia to purchase supplies, and the shiver that had run through him when a raven landed at her feet, and almost seemed to lean into her hand when she reached out and patted its head.

But most of all, Percy dreamed of Vex. The years of his life blurred into an amalgam, with Vex as the center of every best moment. He dreamed of her fletching arrows with Trinket curled up behind her. He dreamed of her during late nights and blue, sleepy mornings. He dreamed of her riding up ahead on the road, tracking the course for hours on end. Her calm confidence at tense negotiations. Wading beside him up to their chests in the clear water of the Bay of Gifts. He dreamed of the night they attended the stuffiest gala in the world on a trip to Vasselheim, and the inky blue shade of her dress, and the mid-summer air coming in through the window when they finally escaped back to their room. They had been just the right amount of drunk that night, and giddy after hours of watching people behave poorly. 

“Who takes away the wine at a ball?” she’d said in amused disbelief as they arrived.

Percy held the door open for her to enter the room, then followed close behind her. Someone had lit a lantern and hung it by the balcony so they wouldn’t have to stumble around in the darkness. The flame through the glass cast the room in a pleasant, mellow glow. 

“It’s inexcusable,” he agreed, closing the door.

Her words were reaching him, but he was not really processing them; Percy was too busy eyeing the seeming hundreds of buttons lining up the back of her evening gown, and calculating how long it would take him to undo each one by hand. 

When Vex turned around and caught him staring, she all but simpered. “You know what it reminds me of?”

“What does it remind you of?”

Percy was on her by then, twirling her around, gently pushing her back to the door. Her arms found their way around his neck and hung there in comfortable familiarity, one hand ruffling through his hair.

“Our wedding.”

“Which one?” he said, with a pause to kiss the spot beneath her ear, just below where the diamonds in her earrings swayed and batted against her skin. He heard her chest hitch at the feel of his warm breath there. “The one where we didn’t tell any of our family? Or perhaps—” he kissed a path down her neck, across her collarbones, “—the one where you died?”

Vex leaned into him as she tipped her head back and laughed—a full, heavy laugh, throat bare, fingernails digging lightly into his scalp. The warm reverberation of it carried through her body and into his sternum, where it urged him on. There was no time for buttons. Percy began taking up handfuls of her gown, pulling endlessly in search of the damn hem with one hand while the other unclipped his belt and yanked it free from the loops.

“The one where I died,” she said, out of breath from laughter and the rising excitement of arousal. “When we got back to the rehearsal dinner, and they’d cleared away all the wine glasses! And you said—”

The words fell short as he finally found her lips. She gasped against his mouth, then giggled, and kissed him hard. When Percy broke away, it was only to gather her in his arms and lift her up, pressing her firmly against the door, squaring his hips beneath her. One of her shoes clattered as it hit the ground.

“Did the cultists run off with the bottle opener, too?” he said, recalling his past words from memory. And in unison, he and Vex recited, “Someone get this woman a _fucking_ drink.”

Then they were both laughing, and their laughter dissolved into the soft, lovely sounds he’d stored deep within his memory. Or his subconscious. 

This was the last of his pleasant dreams, and the aftermath was cruel. Percy woke up disoriented in time and place, reaching out for Vex’s shoulder in the dark. Reality rocked him as his hand came down on bare sheets instead. He suddenly remembered where he was, who he was supposed to be, and how long it had taken to fall asleep. Percy rolled over to check the numbers on the clock that glowed beside his glasses on the nightstand.

It was almost four in the morning. He had been asleep for thirty minutes.

* * *

Percy read about time and outer space and cults and religion. He learned about electricity, and the combustion engine, and (although he still didn’t understand it) a liminal space known as the internet. He learned that the large, noisy shapes overhead were airships—airplanes—full of passengers, and that they flew without magic. The world had too much knowledge, but he had to know it all. Or at least enough of everything to know whether it was important. His list grew longer and longer with each day and each new factoid about the universe. He fought hard to keep his thoughts in line.

When the library got to be too much for him to stomach, Percy walked the streets in search of hints and signs. Recognizable faces. Pointed ears. Anything, really. Every raven fluttering around the park was a sign from another dimension. The slightest hint of a familiar voice sent his skin crawling with excitement, always to end in disappointment. Percy craved Vex’s company and her insight. He tried to imagine her sitting beside him on a park bench, surrounded by the bobbing heads of pigeons. What would she see that he hadn’t? There must be something out here. All he needed was one clue.

Without any familial connections, Percy returned to the last place where people claimed to know him: the job he’d been fired from the day of his accident. Percy persuaded his former coworkers to let him take them out for drinks. He played the ignorant but sincere fool, asking for details about his life that might lead somewhere. Nobody really knew him, though. He had worked there for eight years, and in that time, had shirked invitations and avoided making friends. When faced with this new and apologetic Freddy, a few of his former coworkers admitted that they had been frightened of him. The Frederick of New York had been intelligent, reclusive, short of words, and disinterested in others. In short, the potential mass murder type. 

At his hospital appointments, Hernandez did most of the talking. Percy spent their sessions interrogating her on her employers, the hospital owners, the people who worked there, and every other person who he thought might be the link. Getting people of authority to talk about themselves was never a challenge, and Hernandez was no different. She patiently responded to everything he asked, in exchange for the opportunity to run some more elaborate tests on his brain. She seemed to think him mad, but harmlessly so. She explained a few conditions that could manifest trauma relating to false memories. Even false lives and personalities. None of them suited his “symptoms.” 

“The one thing these conditions have in common is that they tend to improve,” she said to him, at least once per week. “In a few months’ time, you might wake up and realize that all of these—these _figments_ —are just gone. So try not to worry too much, Frederick.”

The sound of his father’s name, directed back at him, had begun to set Percy’s teeth on edge.

Hernandez and the handful of other medical professionals who popped in to watch him lay motionless in a cylindrical machine and answer questions seemed to think it almost thrilling. They had their very own medical mystery. For Percy, the novelty wore off quickly. He continued returning to appointments, but with dwindling expectations, more so with the hope of overhearing something in the hallways or seeing someone he might know. But he never did.

* * *

Awake, Percy fretted over the possibilities that he’d stricken from his list. The number of realistic avenues was growing sparse. He began to worry that he’d skipped a step somewhere, that he had to start over. Meanwhile, he was losing time.

Asleep, he dreamed, and that was worse. It was so much worse. The faces of his family refused to come into focus. Vex followed him everywhere, lurking in the back of his consciousness even when she wasn’t in the forefront. She never spoke to him, wouldn’t look at him, barely let him glimpse her profile. Percy reached out to her, and she disappeared. Her figure dissolved into ash in a pile at the touch of his hand. He woke up retching, and stayed awake for hours before doing it over again. He never learned. The result never changed.

Restful sleep had become a futility. Percy needed it—desperately, by now—but couldn’t find it. The days had begun to blend, each one both longer and shorter than the last, and broken apart by the fruitless hours of the night. Percy tried supplements. He tried meditation. He walked around the city until his legs begged for rest. Anything to get some dreamless sleep. He was running on two hours a night. Sometimes less. Even beneath layers of exhaustion, Percy could see the cycle beginning to fulfil itself. He knew his own weaknesses well enough to know where he was heading, but he couldn’t stop, because he wasn’t the one steering anymore.

Hernandez warned him repeatedly to stop chewing on the wound inside his mouth. The stitches had come out, but Percy had developed the bad habit of worrying it between his teeth. It bled frequently, leaving him with a coppery taste. He began to grow accustomed to it.

* * *

Percy scoured his medical record. There were hundreds of pages chronicling his accident, his treatment, and his aberrant behavior. Early on, he had made a list of every person mentioned in these pages and looked them up online. Most of them he had tracked down and followed around for a day or two. A handful he even spoke with, if he thought he could get away with it. That venture had not been successful, but now, with nowhere else to turn, he went back to scrounging his past work for missing hints.

Percy had no recall of his month of semi-consciousness, but based on the records, he had spent it in a feral terror. He read entries noting the various times he hit people, screamed at them to let him go, demanded to see his friends—the records kept track of the names he said. Vex’ahlia. Grog. Cassandra. Vax. All of his children. The author stated concern that he might be irreversibly brain damaged, even if the diagnostic tests didn’t show anything. And then, one day, he went very quiet without explanation. When he reemerged a few days later, the first entries appeared that aligned with his memory. One page detailed Dr. Miller’s recount of his first conscious encounter:

_Patient is awake and alert, but confused. Calm, no longer violent. He expressed concern about the location of a wife. He did not accept explanation about his accident. He appears confused. Change in demeanor may be a sign of good progress. However, patient fled hospital when left unattended. Police called, unable to locate patient. They will put out word to other precincts. Patient may have taken wallet and jacket from nurse secretary Michael Owens. Owens reminded again not to leave valuables under desk during lunch._

Someone had taken the time to talk to his former employer and tried to track down some family members, if only to rule out a pre-existing condition. According to the investigator, the people identified as his parents had been killed in a car crash when he was seventeen. He didn’t recognize their names or faces. 

While sifting through the box of his personal effects, Percy found the information card that Dr. Hernandez had left for him on the memory loss group. If there were others, what better a place to find them than at special meetings just for people with his supposed condition?

The location was easy enough to find, now that Percy had his bearings and had learned to read a subway map. The support group met in the basement of a church that claimed to be nondenominational, sat in a circle on folding metal chairs, and commiserated under the leadership of a portly man named Amir. Give or take a person or two, the same crowd showed up each week. 

He didn’t make it long before he gave it up. Percy didn’t know any of these people, and their problems were neither the indulgent, amusing kind nor the more relatable “everyone thinks I made up my entire life until this point” variety. He’d have felt bad for them, were he not too busy being disappointed. Most had stories about recovering from traumatic brain injuries earned in combat or in accidents. Their memory loss only reached as far back as the incident, maybe a few days before. Often, they had more trouble with remembering things that had happened after the fact. A few had early signs of something degenerative and terrifying—forgetfulness that they could pass off as foolishness until they lost their jobs, their spouses, their money. 

Percy could only take so much of singeing his tongue on burnt coffee while staring at the same crack in the concrete floor, half-listening to Margaret tell the same story she told last week because everyone was too polite to stop her. Percy left during the smoke break one day, certain no one would miss him. Therapy hadn’t been the point of it, anyway. 

* * *

Percy rode down to the southernmost end of the island and sat on a pier where the air smelled like fried food and low tide, watching groups pass by with their families and their friends and their dogs. Sometimes people glanced at him, but no one ever _saw_ him. A drizzle had been hovering in the air all day. As the drops began to amass and fall, the umbrellas started popping up like mushrooms after rain— _fwip_ , _fwip_ , _fwip_ , all around him, in a hundred colors against the steely grey sky. The activities went on, unperturbed by the change of weather. The city moved like a machine, tireless and wearing.

Beyond the docks, ships came in from the ocean while smaller boats ferried tourists back and forth from Ellis Island. Planes upon planes upon planes flew overhead—their noise always hummed just in the background of the city. Percy had read about how they worked, but whatever curiosity piqued beyond that basic knowledge, he stamped down under his foot. He didn’t need to know about airplanes, or motorized ships, or the internal combustion system. He didn’t need to know about batteries, light fixtures, or the inner mechanics of the MRI. He needed to go home. 

His determined optimism had always served him well. So long as he could take a meaningful step toward solving his problem, he could keep it together. The real trouble began once he’d walked the last few known pathways, and none of them led anywhere. Frederick had been born in the city and spent his entire life here. Percy went to his schools, talked to his teachers, tracked down his doctors, looked him up in the public records, paper newspapers, online articles at the public computer. Dead end after dead end after dead end. 

It came on slowly. Percy felt something begin to shift in the back of his mind, like the presence of someone standing over his shoulder. First he looked around to confront it, but didn’t see anything. He resorted to telling himself that it couldn’t be there, because if it was, he would have nothing left. But he was tired, and the persistent failure was whittling down his resolve. He had begun to think of what Bob—Shanak—had said about madness. The thing about losing your mind was that you forgot the things that came naturally to you.

Percy hadn’t lost his mind, though. He knew who he was.

Right?

* * *

And then, one evening on arriving back to his barren apartment and dropping his bag on the table like he did every day, there it was. A singular thought that had been waiting to spring on him for weeks:

_This is my home, and it always has been._

He wished he could have called it doubt. He wished he could have called it fear. But the truth of it was in that moment, Percy knew that his life before was just a fantasy. In the trauma of the car crash, it had been the escape that took him from his lonesome, meaningless life.

Percy regretted the thought immediately, and clawed it back with a white hot shame. It made his face flush with heat and sent his palms prickling, painfully, as if with the early stages of frostbite. Even once he’d wrangled it back into its proper place, however, what remained was still grim. He had nothing at all to show for his work, and nowhere left to begin. It was enough to loosen his grip and send him pitching in a spiral.

Biting back an angry scream, trembling with the effort of it, Percy dropped to his knees in the center of the apartment. His apartment. He slammed his fist down, punching the floor with no regard for how it might sound to the tenant below. Then again, and again. He put all of his weight into it. His fist began to slide against the ceramic tile as the blood began to pool. The violence of it brought incredible relief. It was a release, and a distraction, and a punishment. He kept on going until something spasmed in his hand, and his senses sprang back in. 

“Goddamn it,” Percy said in a low, harsh voice. The skin over his knuckles was a mess. Red streaked across the ivory floor.

Those next few days were raw and sore.

He could not eat. He slept even less than before, and in short, stolen fragments. The voices and faces of family swarmed him in his dreams, jolting him awake with the belief that he had heard them for real. The disappointment struck him each time like a barbed whip. Percy cried until his head felt dense, until it throbbed. And when he had cried all that he could cry, he lay there in abject misery until he had no choice but to move, or sleep and dream again.

Percy spent most of a week like this, sprawled face-down across the couch with his long legs dangling over the end of the armrest, aware of his pathetic behavior but just too drained to change it. He had written them all off as fiction. He knew that they weren’t—he was convinced that they weren’t—but the need to convince himself otherwise had planted something unforgivable in his mind: the tiniest sprig of doubt.

A feverishness set over him. Percy didn’t know whether he was actually ill, but it was pretty clear that he was sick. 

He hadn’t iced his hand after striking the floor, and it swelled badly. He couldn’t make a fist without cracking the blackened scabs over his knuckles. It did not matter. For weeks, he had run on a concocted high of urgency and determination. When that well had dried up, all that remained at the bottom was despairing exhaustion. Self-loathing and self-pity. Percy indulged it, in part because he didn’t have a choice—his body took over and dragged him down. The efforts had left him sitting in a hollow void. The walls around him loomed tall and windowless, without a foothold or a ladder. 

The darkness must always be cast by some light, but Percy could not see it. He had searched and searched and searched.

He missed two appointments with Hernandez. He didn’t bother calling to tell her why. Let them think that he had run away, he thought. Let them think that he had died. It was the smallest form of retribution that he could take on whatever power had placed him here.

Eventually, though, he did have to leave the apartment. What little he had forced himself to eat had run out, and even without an appetite, he knew that he would not last long without food. So Percy willed himself to stand. He dressed, his hand screaming as he went through the motions. The injured fingers jerked and tremored like a jackhammer, too weak to grip his shoelaces. After several seconds of trying to tie them, Percy gave it up and tucked the laces into the top of his boots.

Then, with his hood pulled over his ears, he set out to the closest convenience store for a tub of dry oats, some bananas, instant coffee, and a handle of Svedka. In the time that had passed (he wasn’t certain how long, but several days at least) the weather had grown colder. Stepping outside felt much like stepping through a doorway rigged with a bucket trap of freezing water. The shock of it stalled him momentarily, but it also brought him back like nothing else had. As he walked, hands tucked up in his sleeves and crammed in his sweatshirt pocket, he felt the sharpness of the wind recalibrating his brain. The food helped as well. Back in his apartment, Percy poured some oats into a mug with three spoonfuls of coffee mix, covered it with lukewarm water, added a splash of vodka, and knocked it back like a shot.

Percy didn’t feel better, but the small act of self-preservation had made him less useless. Afterwards, he sat for a long time at the kitchen table, leaning on one palm while the fingers of his injured hand weakly clutched the empty mug. The pressure pushing on the inside of his skull had him almost praying for relief. He’d have killed for a lesser restoration. He still had so much to do. 

* * *

A sort of fog settled over Percy and his daily routine. He was done with shedding tears. Each morning, he fortified his nerves for a long day out with a cup of oats-coffee-vodka-water. He kept a banana in his shoulder bag in case he needed something quick to eat, but more often he fished it out again at the end of the day and set it back on the table. Sometimes he found it squashed at the bottom. 

Percy found the thermos that he had been using for coffee and poured the rest of the handle into it. He kept it on his person when he left the apartment, refilling often.

His life had become a series of walks and crowded subway rides to and from sources of knowledge—public computers, people, museums, monuments, and books above all. Worn library books whose spines opened limply in his hands. University books with highlights and handwriting in the margins. Books crammed in the dim corners of old community centers and houses of faith. Books that got him kicked out of shops when proprietors caught him reading instead of buying. Percy couldn’t afford to be pretentious in his taste. He skimmed them all, read what jumped out, and borrowed the rest (legally or illegally). He had amassed a volume of notebooks in which he wrote down anything of potential significance. Their substance had grown broader and broader as he started to grasp for possibilities. 

At night, the same old images and words played vividly across his eyelids. They woke him up every hour, sometimes more, until he gave it up and spent the time before sunrise curled on his side of the bed with a notebook. The headphones drowned out the city noise, but one could only listen to Midnight Love so many times, and he had neither time nor energy to figure out how to add more music. 

Alcohol helped, though. A lot. Percy found that if he paced around the apartment for about an hour, tipping the bottle into his mouth every few minutes, eventually he blacked out. The first time he did it, he woke up to the incredible sight of daylight in the room; he had slept for almost a full night, without a single dream.

The thrill of it seized him. Soon he was practicing it like a mantra. Come home, read through his notes, start sipping. Too quick and he’d vomit. Too slow and the anxiety began to play tricks on him—he would start to ruminate on Frederick, and Percival, and wonder why he never found a trail connecting them. And then he would start to think about the person (not a child, not a man) who’d been pulled from an icy river and laid out across the planks of a ship, half-dead and half-naked. Who had _that_ guy been?

Most often, he regained consciousness in his bed. Sometimes it was the couch, and on a few occasions, he came-to with the pattern of the bathroom tile pressed into his cheek. Percy tried to balance his mutual desires for dreamless sleep and sharp focus, but as the days progressed, he felt himself sliding toward the former. He was at least a little bit drunk most of the time. He needed sleep to function more than ever, and he was barely functioning as-is.

Percy had gone through insulated periods in his life, but he knew himself to be a social creature. He was not equipped for isolation. He also had enough self-awareness to know that he was increasingly in danger. A lack of normal interaction, sleep, progress, and sobriety had combined to leave him… reduced. Absent. It was a sensation beyond sadness or nostalgia, even worse than grief. He didn’t acknowledge the extent of that feeling until one morning while waiting for the six train to take him uptown.

He hadn’t slept at all last night. After getting started too early and too quick on his ritual, Percy had wound up with his head in the toilet, heaving up a mixture of bile and vodka that burned like the foulest potion. He had been too afraid of alcohol poisoning to try again. Instead, when he fell asleep, he dreamed of Vex standing next to a sarcophagus with the stone lid pushed open. She had been wearing leather armor adorned in black feathers. 

“It’s quite a clever story, isn’t it?” she said. She hadn’t spoken to him in weeks, and her voice was colder than he remembered, almost mocking. “You should write a book, darling. Tales of wondrous adventure, where people come back from the dead.” 

Then they both leaned over the open tomb, and there at the bottom was a portal to another world. His world, he knew, in a way that dreamers knew things. When Percy reached down to lift it out, a black cloud puffed out from inside, spreading up like smoke from a fire. He leapt back, dodging out of the way as the tendrils struck out, but Vex didn’t move. He turned around and found her lying there, motionless. Her chest settled down into her finale exhale. Scrambling to reach her, Percy cried out her name. The floor slipped out from under him. He careened, grabbed for the sarcophagus, clawed his way back toward the limp form, sobbing. 

By the time he got there, her skin had turned to paper that crumpled in his hands. Scrawled along the pages in common, and celestial, and elven, and English, it read “fiction is a window.”

Percy had spent the following hours awake on the couch in the dark, full of hateful doubt. 

Now, as he waited on the subway platform, he wondered again. 

Reality was just a sensory experience. The nerves’ interpretation of stimuli. Who was to say that he couldn’t have dreamed that life? Dragons and magic and marriage and vampires and lore and sex and vestiges and drowning—all memories, concrete but abstract. He could imagine the weight of Animus in his hand right now, if he really concentrated. It was there, just as plain as the taste of vodka going stale on his tongue. 

All of that was within his capacity to project onto his living senses. It didn’t mean that it was real. 

Reality was the tangible world before him. Here, the underground air of the subway station clung humid and dank to his face. It swelled in his lungs. It was real. He could sense the others around him, all occupied in their own thoughts. A city of eight million people, and he was completely alone. Percy felt the weight of his clothing, the headphones in his ears, the textured yellow strip of plastic warning him that he had reached the edge of the platform. He felt the bare skin at the base of his ring finger, and for the first time, couldn’t recall anything else. 

Maybe, maybe not. Who could say? He once dreamed of telling Vax he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if Kashaw hadn’t brought Vex back from dead. Had she ever died? To die, one first needed to live. Certainly not on this plane. Perhaps it was all a projection of his subconscious. Just a reflection in a window.

Percy knew that none of this frenzy reflected on his face. He kept his expression flat, even bored, eyes neutral behind the frames of Frederick’s glasses. No one would glance at him and see the crisis. He didn’t budge at the rushing sound of the train’s approach. When the dark tunnel began to glow with looming light, he watched it come. 

And he thought to himself, how easy it would be to take that single step off the platform, and none of those questions would matter. 

Something clicked in his mind. Percy awoke for real, for the first time in days. Spooked like a dog by a passing car, he staggered back from the edge, almost falling over, startling others standing nearby. They backed off to let him out, and he ran up the stairs and out of the subway station into the bright, cold morning.

This wasn’t working. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> why are all these chapters so fucking long? i'm so sorry
> 
> I hemmed and hawed over the title of this story until I pretty much had the whole thing written. I wanted it to be a song reference because that's Extra and Fun, but I couldn't think of a title that really clicked, so I picked the first line of "The Wretched" by Nine Inch Nails instead, which is in the top five of my "never skip this" list. It seemed fitting, and I got to do a title drop in this chapter. The album that pitched me into writing this whole thing was the Add Violence EP, so I felt I owed NIN that much at least. Anyway. Uh. Hope you had fun! See you next time.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Above ground, Percy told himself to cut it out and breathe. He listened to the rumble of the train below as it departed from the station. His legs shook so severely that he had to bend over double and hold his knees in his palms.

None of the hundreds of passer-by stopped to help him, but they didn’t gawk, either. The crowd simply parted around him where he balanced on the curb.

It took several minutes, but somehow, miraculously, Percy fought off the panic attack. Slowly, he walked his hands up his legs until he was standing straight again. Off to his left, the middle-aged vendor of a street cart selling pre-packaged foods and newspapers had leaned out of her sale window to watch.

“You want a sandwich?” she said.

Percy stared, nonplussed. “…Sure.”

The woman handed over a clear container made of flimsy disposable plastic and sealed with a piece of tape. Inside was what looked like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on marbled bread. She held up her hand to stop him when Percy started feeling around his pockets for his wallet.

“Next time,” she said, waving him off. “I used to be homeless, too. Don’t give up, man.”

Too thrown by how this morning was going to really process what she was saying, Percy walked off with a mumbled word of thanks, holding the sandwich container in both hands. The nearest park was only a block or two west. When he got there, he found a place to sit on the edge of a water fountain, in the spot with the least amount of chewing gum. His stomach lurched at the thought of eating. But his body needed real food (whether a sugar-filled sandwich constituted “real food” was a separate question, though regardless of the answer, it was probably still better than oats sloshed with vodka). Percy took almost half an hour to convince himself to have a few deliberate bites. After that, it was easier to finish the sandwich; the last of the adrenaline had burned from his system, leaving him aware of his hunger for the first time in weeks.

While he sat there, wishing he had something to wash down the thick peanut butter other than alcohol, he noticed for the first time that it was autumn. All the leaves on the surrounding trees had changed over to their reds and browns and yellows. The air was cool and dry now in a way it hadn’t been before, but the sun that shone on him from between two skyscrapers still had warmth to it. He found himself thinking of Pike, and all the times she’d reached into the ether to pull his thread back from the other side of consciousness. 

* * *

That night, Percy returned to the church basement and joined the others with memory loss. They welcomed him as if he hadn’t just brooded silently during his prior visits. The group leader, Amir, patted him on the back in a knowing, fatherly way.

“It’s been some time, Freddy.” Amir scanned Percy’s face, holding him by the shoulder at arm’s length. “You look like you could use some coffee.”

“Please,” said Percy.

Armed with a styrofoam cup, Percy circled up with the others. The crowd was mostly the same as before, give or take a few faces he didn’t recognize. He sat in his metal folding chair and listened to them talk. The stories weren’t relatable, but they were human, and they were real.

A week or so passed like this. In the daylight hours, he returned to his books and his notes. Come sundown, he made his way to the church basement as often as the meetings occurred. Percy was still drinking more than he was eating, but no one in the group seemed to mind that he was never quite sober, or even notice (and if they did notice, they were being polite about it). He attended every session without contributing, speaking only when spoken to, and declining the metaphorical podium when it was offered. 

Percy’s particular brand of insomnia had a way of keeping him in limbo—he was never really awake, and never really asleep. Being part of the group kept his runaway mind tethered to his body. He felt as though he were waiting for something.

On a nondescript evening, Percy volunteered to make the obligatory pot of coffee. He didn’t know how to operate the machine, or proportion the water to the grounds, but he suspected that even if he set the whole thing on fire it would taste the same as ever. Today’s half dozen attendees were just settling in for their meeting when the basement door opened again. Percy noted the sound but didn’t pay it any mind. He was busy wiping down the serving table and arranging the white cups in a neat line with the powdered creamer and the stirring straws. If they were going to be pathetic, they might as well be neat about it.

He heard Amir speak first, though he wasn’t really listening. “Ah, Katie! I’m so glad to see you! It’s been a while—we were getting worried.”

“Thanks, but you don’t have to worry about me.”

Percy stopped halfway through filling his cup as a strange tingle flushed over his body. He simultaneously tried to hold still and spin around—the effect was a motion that spilled the hot coffee over his hand. That voice. He was afraid to move. How many times had this happened in the past? He must be sleeping. No, he was drunk.

Well, Percy _was_ definitely drunk, but even so...

“I’ve just been working a lot. Going in after this, actually.”

Yes, he knew that voice. Percy was certain. A soft touch landed on his arm, and he jerked again.

“Oops, sorry Freddy.” Meghan had appeared at his side. She was looking at him with mild concern. “Didn’t mean to startle you. All right there?”

For the first time, Percy noticed the coffee dripping down his wrist and staining the cuff of his sleeve. 

“Sorry—just—spilled a bit—” he managed.

“Let me help you.” She grabbed a fistful of napkins and began blotting his arm, then the tablecloth. “Were you burned?”

“No, no. Thank you, let me get that.”

Setting his drink down, his back still turned to the group, Percy crouched to mop up the droplets from the concrete. He was glad for the few seconds to collect himself. By that time he stood, Meghan had cleaned up the mess on the table and thrown the wad of napkins in the metal trash bin. She offered an apologetic smile and scurried off to join the circle. Percy allowed himself one last moment of pause before he braced himself with a deep breath and turned around to confront his latest delusion. 

Standing there was a... person. A woman with a knit cap pulled down over her ears, whose face bore a long scar across one side. She was by far the shortest person he’d seen in almost two months. And Percy had never been happier to see someone in his life than he was to see her then.

“Happy” wasn’t even the word to describe it. Percy was so stunned, so utterly confounded, that for several seconds, he was not capable of feeling anything at all. The entire universe had just unfolded in front of him, and all he could do was stare at it blankly. 

“—the new guy?”

Percy only caught the end of her statement when he realized she was talking about him. The conscious life suddenly flooded back to his body. He felt himself start moving towards where Amir had paused in setting up the last chairs to greet her. Percy wiped his hand on his jeans and offered it without thinking about how he should act. The woman didn’t seem moved by the sight of his face; she had a relaxed, confident air of someone who made a point of not being surprised by anything.

“I’m Katie,” said Lady Kima, as she took his hand and shook it. 

She had small hands and a serious grip. The stiff and swollen state of his injured tendons made Percy’s handshake somewhat sad by comparison. He saw her eyes flit over the still-bruised scabs on his knuckles as he let go and pulled away.

“I’m—” Percy faltered momentarily. “Freddy.” 

“Freddy, huh? You forget your name a lot?” 

He made a vague gesture to the room. “Occasionally. Part of the territory, isn’t it?”

Kima gave him a once-over. Percy did the same, searching for a sign on her face while trying to keep his own expression neutral. The look she had was intense as ever, but it had more curiosity to it than recognition. Her posture was not quite right either. She was too slack, too casual. It was as if someone else was piloting Kima’s body and only had an approximate sense of what she was like.

"Hah! Good point, my bad," she said, after a pause. "What’s your story?”

“Car versus pedestrian incident,” he said noncommittally. “You?”

“Long story. But car versus car is a good summary I guess.”

Percy tried his hardest not to stare at her for the entire meeting. It seemed ludicrous that after weeks and weeks of searching, someone from his previous life would just burst into existence before his eyes. He hardly believed she was there, and was even more worried that she might evaporate if he let his attention go elsewhere. Like him, Kima did not offer any anecdotes when Amir opened the floor. But unlike Percy, she at least seemed to think that she was in the right place. When Margaret told her story about the tuna selection at Trader Joe’s, she nodded and offered encouragement as if she hadn’t heard the story before. 

In hindsight, Percy should have spent the hour planning what to do once the meeting was over. He didn’t, though, and as the hour closed and the attendees began filing up the stairwell, he realized that he had to act immediately. If she left now, he might not have the chance to try again. Kima had just pulled on her gloves and started for the exit when Percy launched himself from his chair.

“Excuse me!”

Kima stopped at the sound, turning slowly to watch him approach. She was wearing a padded vest over her sleeved shirt, and had turned the fuzzy hood up even though she was already wearing a hat. Her dirty blonde hair spilled out from underneath in a long, tangled mess. 

“Katie, right?” Percy hoped he appeared calmer than he felt. When she nodded, he had to stop himself from sighing in relief. “I know this is rather forward, but—would you join me for a drink? I’d like to compare notes on our respective car-related incidents.”

Another keen look. As Kima scanned his face again, her eyes lingered on his. He felt for the second time that she was searching for something and coming up empty. But she must have written off whatever suspicion she may have had, because a moment later, she shrugged.

“All right,” she said, in a nonchalant tone. “But you should know, I don’t fuck dudes.”

He nodded dutifully. “Are you free now? For the drink, of course. Not the, uh—”

“The fucking?”

Percy tried and failed to suppress a smirk. “The fucking. Yes, not that. The drink, I mean.”

“Sure, what the hell.” Kima shrugged again and jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Gotta make a pit stop by the office first. Tag along if you want.”

Without further invitation or instruction, Kima turned and resumed her beeline toward the exit. Not willing to question his luck, while still not quiet believing it, Percy followed after her. They went up a flight of crumbling steps and out the basement door that led them to the sidewalk. Half a block from the church, she stopped without warning and stepped off the curb. For a wild moment, he thought that she had changed her mind and decided to ditch him. The jangling sound of keys and the high-pitched beep of a remote car lock corrected him. 

“You can drive?” Percy said in surprise.

Kima had walked around the front of a car and pulled open the driver’s seat door.

“Wow, rude.”

“That’s—sorry, not what I meant—”

She shook her head and said, exasperated, “Just get in the car.”

Percy knew nothing about cars beyond the little he’d read about them, but just from looking at it, he could tell it was a fast one. Someone with a keen eye had cut sharp, sleek angles into the design. A decal on the hood featured a rearing horse emblazoned on a shield. The car’s frame sat low enough to the ground that Kima didn’t have to climb up to get into her seat. Even the shiny, deep ocean blue boasted a flamboyant confidence. 

Percy felt an itch in his palms and had the sudden, prodigious urge to pop the hood and take a look at the engine. He gave himself a mental slap upside the head and told himself to get in the car.

Kima’s car had only two doors, with an impossibly small space in the back seat. The front did not fare too much better. Inside, Percy had to cram his legs at an angle under the dashboard in order to seat himself. When Kima saw him struggling, she hit a button on the center console and his seat rolled backwards, opening up more room. Her own seat was positioned close to the steering wheel, with a cushion that propped her up enough to see. Glancing down by the pedals, he saw that she’d rigged them up with extenders to accommodate her height.

Percy would have liked to ask her many things, not the least of which was where on earth she got this car or learned to drive. He didn’t get to ask, though. The car thrummed to life with an oddly satisfying rumble. Percy lurched sideways against the door as Kima cut the wheel and accelerated out of the parking spot, almost clipping the car in front of them.

“Buckle up!” she yelled—unnecessarily, as he was already fumbling to pull the seatbelt over his shoulder, and the blare of music drowned her out.

Heavy on the drums and electronics, the sound emanated from all around, so loud that it hurt his ears. In part to cut the intensity of it, Percy lowered his window. The freezing air began to swirl through the inside, but Kima didn’t tell him to roll it back up. She navigated through traffic, choosing narrow streets and gunning through them when no other cars blocked her way. 

Despite her apparent favor for the accelerator, Kima maneuvered smoothly, and Percy found himself enjoying his first car ride. Being a little tipsy and profoundly high on his proximity to a friend (even if she didn’t know it) both helped in this regard. Percy rested his head against the door and listened to the clear, pained voice of the female vocalist as she sang. Something something howling at the moon, something something. A sad song about losing a loved one. He tried not to infer any subliminal meaning from it, in the way he hoped no one would think anything of Sexual Healing being the most played song on his iPod. 

The wind whipped his hair around his face, stinging his skin. Percy stuck an arm out the window, let the air lift his hand and force it back down. It felt in some way like being on an airship. Lights blew past his vision—the green and red and purple and yellow and blue of streetlights and restaurants and shopping centers—in the singular neons of this plane, commingled with the smells of food and smoke and the fleeting waft of urine. The first time he’d stumbled into Times Square had felt like those long seconds in Raven’s Crest, when he was trapped beneath the surface of the communion pool. He’d panicked, nearly crumpled in on himself from the sensation. The crowd and the flashing billboards and the stories-high screens with polished faces winking down at him had been all too much. Percy had retreated back to the tepid quiet of his apartment to cower until morning. But now Kima was here, and he was sitting in her car, and the stimulus all blurred together beneath the relief he felt in knowing that he was not alone. Even if she didn’t know it, she may well have saved him. 

For the first time in weeks and weeks, his body relaxed. If not for the thrumming excitement, he could have dozed.

Percy’s ears often rang in the quiet, but they felt downright muffled when Kima finally cut the engine and the music stopped. She led him up half a block to the back of one of many nondescript buildings, into the side door, and down a tiled passage made of brick. The air in here felt damp, with a stale smell about it. The reason for that became apparent when she pushed open a solid metal door at the end of the hallway, and the room opened up to show an elevated platform with ropes hung from each side. On this plane or anywhere, Percy would have recognized it for what it was: a place to fight.

Two men stood over by the platform. They had the expectant posture of people who have been waiting for some time, though they showed it differently. One was lean and well-dressed in a suit, with sunglasses on the top of his head despite the late hour. The other wore gym shorts and a tank top. He was huge—Grog-sized, almost—and his muscle mass suggested foul play. One man had his arms crossed over his chest. The other seemed to bristle with energy, and began hopping from toe to toe at the sight of newcomers in the room.

“There you are. We thought you bailed.” The man in the suit shot Percy a look of unveiled suspicion. “Who’s this guy?”

Kima shook her head at the lean man, nonchalant despite his impatient tone. “I’d never bail on you, Randy. You pay me too well for that! And this is Freddy,” she added, throwing a lazy gesture in his direction. “He’s cool.”

“All right…” The man’s eyes lingered with mistrust on Percy, who smiled coldly in response. “You ready to go?”

“Just let me put my stuff down...”

With nowhere else to go, Percy followed Kima across the room to where the far wall was lined with cubbies. She removed her shoes and jacket and stowed them away. She pulled her hat off with one hand and threw it on top of her coat. When she shook her head, her hair lifted momentarily to reveal a pair of pointed ears. 

“Are you really going to fight that man?” Percy said, sounding more concerned than he felt.

“Yup.” Kima tossed her watch onto the pile. “And he’s going to pay me a hundred bucks to do it.”

“With what weapon?” He was curious about what she was wielding on this plane. Surely not a great sword—

“No weapons. Except these.” She held up her fists with a self-indulgent grin.

“You are aware that he is at least three times—” Percy glanced over his shoulder for another look, “—four times your size.”

Kima had stripped down to her sleeveless shirt and the compression shorts under her jeans. Her muscled arms bore the same scars she’d earned in the Underdark. Percy wondered what story she had for them this time. Not that he was going to ask—and if he were, he wouldn’t have had time for the conversation, because Kima was _busy_. She stuck two fingers into the top of her shirt and came up with a tiny plastic bag filled with what looked like powdered chalk. Percy watched in half-amused horror as Lady Kima tapped a small amount out onto an empty cubby, stuck a finger to one side of her nose, and ducked her head.

Dabbing the backs of her fingers against her nose when she straightened up, Kima said, “Have a little faith, Freddy.” And then she winked.

Kima sauntered back over to the men and pulled herself over the ropes, up onto the platform. The muscled man joined her. They took separate corners, each of them poised with their fists hovering up by their chins, waiting for the signal. When the bell rang, they sprung. 

The fight ended so quickly that Percy didn’t have time to doubt the outcome. The man struck down at Kima, but she parried one fist, then the other. She leapt to the side when he kicked out a leg to knock her over. Shifting weightlessly back to the other side as he reached down to grab her, she took advantage of his vulnerable posture and ducked under his arm. He grunted, frustrated, but she was already behind him. 

Kima’s fists flew out in one, two, three rapid blows to his kidneys. His back arched in pain. She darted around to the front again, and before he could straighten up, she had leapt up and flung an arm around his neck. As she swung around, airborne, he careened until the momentum pulled his feet out from under him. He hit the floor backwards, springing against the bouncy mat, her arm still locked around his windpipe. Within seconds, he was tapping out.

“Whoo!” Kima cried in breathless excitement. She jumped to her feet, swinging her fists in a victorious movement, visibly amped up by the mix of adrenaline and cocaine. “Good one, Joe! You almost had me that time.”

The man sat up, rubbing his neck. “It wasn’t even close,” he rasped.

“Haha, yeah, you’re right.” Kima stuck out a hand to help him to his feet. “It was an improvement, though. For you, I mean.”

Once Joe was upright again, she slapped him on the arm and slid out from under the ropes. The man in the suit—Randy—was shaking his head.

“Same time tomorrow?” he asked.

Kima put out an expectant hand. Sighing, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a wad of bills. He counted out five of them and slapped them in her palm.

“Same time tomorrow,” she said. She folded up the money and stuck it in her shirt. “Rest up, Joe!” Then she turned to Percy. “Drink time. You’re buying, right?”

He was, and he did. Three of them, in fact. Percy and the bartender both watched, eyebrows rising ever-higher, as Kima polished off the last drops of her stein. She smacked her hand on the bartop.

“Tanky little thing, aren’t you?” the barman said.

“You have no idea,” said Kima and Percy at the same time.

“One more,” said Kima.

“One more,” Percy assented.

Still staring at the tiny person across his counter, the barman held up a single finger. “One. Last one.”

As he walked off to refill her beer glass, Percy raised his own and took a sip. He’d been nursing this single drink for the better part of thirty minutes, too nervous about plunging back into pure drunkenness. The real purpose for his drinking at all, other than to blend in, was to stave off what would surely be the worst headache of his life. Two straight weeks of living in the fuzzy realm between buzzed and blacked out made the prospect of the aftermath intolerable. 

Kima didn’t seem to notice his restraint. She was in a fine mood following her fight, too busy chatting at him while she came down from her high to question his quietness. She blabbed to him all about her time in the armed service, her discharge after an IED rocked her during a counter-terrorism operation and kick-started her memory issues, and the car crash that came just after she’d recovered from her wounds. Spotty memory loss that clouded the months before the accident, blurring the places she’d been and the people she met. 

“Two head injuries in two years. I woke up in the hospital and barely knew who I was for a few days.”

Unlike Percy, Kima hadn’t woken up swinging. And she had a recall of what her life was like before. She’d been an orphan, and then a transient foster child, and finally a soldier. Percy wondered at the convenience that neither of them should have any living family members. 

Kima thumped her chest with one fist to facilitate a long belch.

“So. Freddy,” she began, in what marginally passed as a casual tone. “Do you know why I agreed to go with you today?”

Lowering his glass to the table, Percy licked his lips and took in a long, slow breath. “Tell me.”

“I don’t know why, but I trust you.” 

“Not sure that’s wise, but thank you.”

“I feel like I... it’s weird. I don’t know.” The barman had slid her last drink across to her. Kima took it, her hands looking even smaller with the glass between them, but didn’t pick it up. “Ever since my injury, I’ve been having trouble remembering things. I’ll be walking to work, and then I just black out and forget where I am. Then a few seconds later, I’m fine again.”

“What happens when you black out?” said Percy, taking care to sound neutral. Nothing more than curious.

Kima shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable. “Sometimes nothing. Sometimes I feel like—like I’m somewhere else. Someplace I’ve made up in my head.”

“Like in a dream?”

“Yeah. Exactly. I get this feeling like I stepped out of reality, almost. It’s so weird. And then today, when I saw you at the meeting, it happened to me again. It was like...”

“What?”

Percy knew, more than he’d known anything since waking up in this life. But he needed to hear her say it.

“I feel like I know you.” Kima squinted at him, her expression searching. “Do I know you? From before?”

Instead of answering, Percy bought himself another few seconds by pretending to take a sip. 

“Do you ever have dreams?” he said, after what felt like an eternity. “Dreams that seem absurd when you wake up, but felt so real when they were happening that you almost believe they could be true?”

“Sometimes…” Kima said into her cup, so quietly that he had to lean in to hear. “Sometimes I dream about dragons.”

“Me too.” Percy squeezed his fist under the table. He paused, steeled himself, and said, “I _do_ know you, Lady Kima of Vord.”

Her knees bumped against his as she turned bodily on her barstool to face him, in a jerking gesture that almost knocked her glass over. Kima’s posture had gone rigid, and as she leaned in close to look at him, he saw the pupils of her eyes dilate, then constrict. Percy didn’t break contact. He looked right back at her, stared into her face, and watched the confusion morph into terror, then recognition. Her mouth opened as if to speak, and then—

At the last second, Percy jumped from his seat and avoided the stream of vomit as she heaved. Behind him, the bartender gave a frustrated “Oh, come on!” and began rushing over. Some of the other patrons stopped their conversations to watch the spectacle. Percy reached out to touch Kima’s shoulder, but just like during her fight, she ducked under his arm. When he spun around, she was sprinting for the door. 

Grabbing up his bag, Percy fumbled frantically for his wallet and pulled out some money. He threw it down without counting it out, shouted “Sorry! Keep the change!” over his shoulder, and darted after her. 

He found Kima outside, kneeling at the curb and retching into the gutter. She didn’t react when he approached and squatted down beside her. Tears were streaming down her chin. 

“Oh god,” he heard her sob between lurches, her voice dense with devastation and nausea. “Oh gods, Allie—Allie, I’m so sorry.”

Kima clutched her knees, leaning over so far that her head bumped the curb. She didn’t react when Percy touched her back, or when he gathered up her hair and held it in a knot at the base of her head. He hadn’t done that since Keyleth outside the bar in Emon, after the heroes feast and their pitiful pub crawl. The memory welled up in his chest and threatened to burst. Percy drew his focus back to Kima on the ground, who had gone from vomiting to sobbing. The sound was raw, gasping, painful. He’d never heard a sound more full of despairing regret. 

He’d had his own chance to cry, so he let her take hers. Percy waited there beside her until his legs were numb and her breath turned from gasping to hyperventilating. A few passers-by paused to help, but he waved them off with a nod of thanks. Eventually, Kima’s breathing slowed. She wiped her face on her sleeve, her eyes squeezed shut.

“Let’s get you home,” Percy said gently. 

He got her to her feet, both of them staggering. She had mentioned that she lived a block from here. He started off in a random direction, but she turned them around and pointed the opposite way. Her weight pressed heavily on his side even as she tried to walk on her own.

Together they set off at a sluggish pace. Kima’s nose had begun to bleed. She wiped the blood onto her shirt without looking at it. Percy kept one hand at the center of her back as they went. Once they reached her apartment building, he finally drew it away and stuffed it in his coat pocket. 

“I’ll come by tomorrow,” Percy said, stepping back. “We need to talk. But you should get some sleep first.”

He began to turn away, but he stopped when he heard her call out, “Percy, wait.”

He shivered at the sound of his name on someone else’s lips. Percy turned back around to find Kima standing in the stone doorway, looking lost, a smear of red smudged across her upper lip.

“You can’t leave me,” Kima said, clinging to the banister with one hand. It was something between a demand and a plea. 

Percy hesitated half a beat. Then he strode back up the steps and followed her inside. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's my girl, y'all :')


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

“You know something, Percy?”

Kima stood in the doorway of her bedroom, eating dry cereal out of the box while she watched Percy search for his glasses in the cushions of the couch. 

“Less every day,” Percy said. “So you’re going to have to be more specific.”

Percy found his glasses—thankfully not cracked—and set them back on his face for safekeeping.

“I think that even if I didn’t have my memory wiped or whatever, I still might not have recognized you.” Kima crunched on another handful of cornflakes. “You smell like the leftovers from a frat party. And you look like shit.”

Percy felt like shit. The couch had thin cushions with lumps in some places and hard spots in others, and sleeping solidly through the night had left his back rather stiff. Worst of all, he was close to one hundred percent sober for the first time in more than three weeks.

He had known before now that he had really screwed things up in that department. But something about coming back to consciousness on the cusp of full-blown withdrawal really put things in perspective. The first thing Percy had done when he woke up, jostled by the noise of cabinets opening and closing in the kitchen, was roll over in search of his shoulder bag. He’d somehow fished his canteen out of it, drank a generous portion, and stashed it back out of sight before Kima rounded the corner to find him awake.

“This is not my best display, I’ll admit. It’s been a long couple of months.”

Percy rubbed his face, noting for the first time that he had grown a full beard. How could he not have noticed that? 

“Months?” Kima said in surprise. A few corn flakes fell from her hand.

“Yes.”

“And you’ve been able to remember all this time?"

“Oh yes.”

Percy propped himself up on an elbow to look at Kima. She had on the same clothes as yesterday, but had put her hair into a tight braid. That was all he had time to notice, because both his head and his stomach swam at his sudden movement. He flopped back down to prevent the risk of making her couch even less appealing. As his vision clarified, he blinked at the sight of a familiar drawing on the ceiling.

“Was that there when I went to sleep?” he said, pointing up at the symbol of Bahamut.

“No. I thought you’d wake up while I was drawing it, but you were sleeping so hard that I checked to make sure you weren’t dead.” The sound of Kima’s footsteps drew closer, and her face appeared over his, looking stern. “It’s just a drawing now, it won’t provide any real protection. I’ve been trying to make contact, but…” Her tone suggested the outcome. “I’m afraid we might be beyond my patron here.”

“We are beyond a lot more than that.”

“Yeah, and I have a lot of questions about it. First of all, have you been like this the whole time?”

Percy assumed she wasn’t talking about his unkempt appearance. He nodded.

“Then if you kept all of your own memories, and I didn’t… whose memories did I have? Do I have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well you’ve been here for a few months, you said?”

“Consciously, yes.” The thought of how much time had passed made him shudder. “They told me—and the records said—about a month before that.”

“And you haven’t figured out what happened?”

“I have theories, but nothing behind them.”

“So what do you know?”

He gave her the abridged version of the facts and his investigation. Everything from his last memory in Whitestone until the day he met her in the basement of the church. Kima started off in the entrance of her room, one shoulder pressed against the doorframe. As Percy went on, she came around to the front of the couch and began to pace. The box of cornflakes hung down by her side. Eventually she set it down, then picked it back up again, the inner bag crinkling loudly as she fished around inside, but then thought twice and set it back down. Then she sat on the coffee table, right across from where Percy had heaved himself up into a sitting position and stuck his fingers under his glasses to rub his eyes. 

“—at _that_ point, I was certain that the soothsayers of this plane weren’t actually capable of conveying anything useful. All six of them had different—are you still listening?”

Kima had taken out her phone and was busy typing away.

“If you and I are both here, there could be others,” she said. “Maybe some of them have an account we could find. Allie could even be here—that’s why she never sent me a message—she could be brainwashed!”

“I’ve already looked. I’ve searched just about every variation of every name I’ve ever heard.”

“You didn’t find me, though, did you?”

Percy took the phone when Kima held it out to him, and squinted at the screen through the fog of his headache.

“No,” he conceded, “I didn’t look at the Instagram of Katie-Fisticuffs.” He scrolled through a dozen posts featuring food, or photos of Kima during a fight, or pictures of her showing off her stocky, muscled figure while lifting weights. Her account had eleven thousand followers. “The naming thing is a bit problematic.”

“But we’ll figure it out, right? There’s got to be something. Allie could be out there, looking for us!”

Percy hated to acknowledge how optimistic he was feeling, because he’d felt that way before. But her intensity and her energy were too keen to be anything but infectious.

“We… at least have a new way to frame things.” Percy passed the phone back across the narrow space, pressing it into her hands. “I think I’ll head to the library at Bryant Park today. Would you care to join me?”

“I’ve got work—meeting at the gym again, remember? At six. And I have bunch of classes today. Personal training clients at ten and two, and I’m teaching vinyasa at noon. I can meet you in between if you want. Just text me.”

“I don’t have a phone.” Percy paused to let her words sink in. “You teach vinyasa?”

Kima looked taken aback, as if she had only just realized that, indeed, she taught a vinyasa class. “I’m… huh. Katie does—that’s—I’ve still got to make money!” she stammered. Percy leaned away as she suddenly stood. “I’ve got to think some things through. I’m going for a jog to clear my head.”

“Is that something you’ve always done?”

“Yes—no. Shut up, Percy.” 

Interesting, he thought, watching her storm back into her bedroom. He’d have to pick her brain about that some more. Fishing his most recent notebook out of his shoulder bag, he jotted down “double memories?”

Kima reappeared wearing sneakers and earbuds as Percy was cross-referencing an earlier notebook where he’d studied up on psychological disorders involving multiple personalities. In one hand she held her phone. The other had a rolled-up towel.

“You wanna come along to my vinyasa class? I can get you in for free.”

“Absolutely not,” Percy said, not looking up from his notes.

His vision went dark as Kima chucked the towel at his head. The book in his hand went flying.

“In that case, there’s a spare key on the counter if you decide to go anywhere. Take a shower while I’m gone, why don’t you. And that’s coming from me.”

His pride stung a little, which he supposed was actually a good thing. 

“Which you? Katie?” he called out.

The door slammed. Percy tugged the towel off of his head and fixed his crooked glasses. It was probably not a good sign that he’d been called smelly by a person who felt more comfortable in yesterday’s sweaty rags than in clean clothes. Or maybe that was Katie talking. He had a suspicion that even Kima didn’t know yet.

In the odd quiet that followed her departure, Percy took a self-guided tour of the apartment. It was an uncommonly short tour. Kima’s apartment had a single bedroom (the door was closed, and he left it that way) and a single bathroom. The rest of the space was a small but comfortable living room and a kitchen, with a wood-and-laminate countertop marking the boundary between the two areas. The kitchen had a small wooden table and two chairs. Other than the television and its stand, the living room’s only places to sit were a loveseat and the couch where Percy had slept. The fireplace had a stack of dusty DVD cases piled up inside instead of wood. Clearly, Kima didn’t host many parties. And interestingly, like Frederick’s place, he saw no signs that Katie had any close relationships—no friends’ photographs on the walls, or birthday cards on the mantle.

The apartment’s small bathroom was still bigger than the one at Frederick’s place, and the faucet handle wasn’t as suspiciously loose. There was also far more clutter. Laundry piled up along the walls and on the path between the door and the tub, as if Kima had a custom of stepping out of her clothes on her way over and never picking them up again. Beneath the collection of active wear, jeans, and undergarments he spied a well-trodden bath mat in the same shade of violet as the shower curtain. 

Percy took a few moments to gather the courage to peek behind the curtain, worried that he might find mold and a decade’s worth of long hair clogging up the drain. Luckily, somehow, it was cleaner than the outside. He sighed in relief and ventured back out long enough to find the kitchen.

He’d never used a coffee pot other than the big one at the memory group meetings, but it came to life after just a few moments of tinkering. The smell of the coffee brewing was enough to take the edge off of his headache, but not enough. The bottle of Bailey’s in the cupboard would help that along—just a few ounces at the bottom of a Spider-Man mug, nothing more. Enough to get him through the next few hours without having to confront the inevitable. He filled the mug of coffee so full that he had to balance it in both hands and shuffle back to the bathroom.

Percy spent altogether too much time in the shower. With Kima out and about and their conversation unfinished, he had little else to do but take his time. Taking intermittent sips of coffee, he held the bottles of shampoo and conditioner at arm’s length to read them without his glasses on. The room filled with the smell of coffee and artificial coconut shampoo—not unpleasant, and at least better than whatever Kima had said about frat parties. Percy hadn’t realized how long his hair had gotten until he was scrubbing all the grease out of it. His beard had grown long and scraggly, out of control. It would not do.

Going through the motions felt like waking up from a long sleep. And yet, at the same time, it lulled him in a way that sleep had not. After twenty minutes, a haze had gathered on the ceiling as steam continued to spout from the spigot. Percy kept on standing there and let the heat pound a red mark into his back. The sensation fixed him with a permanent, rippling chill. Its warmth eased some of the tension he’d been harboring in his neck.

At last, he found the will to shut the water off. The metal rungs of the shower curtain clanged against the rod as he pulled the curtain back, shivering and fumbling for his towel. 

The mirror above the sink had fogged over. Percy could see the blur of his reflection, like an apparition. Leaner than he remembered. He toweled off his body and his shaggy head. The knowledge that someone finally knew him had set in a self-awareness that had been missing, and with it came a small twinge if mortification. He resolved to collect himself properly this time. And it would have to start, he realized upon recalling that he only had his dirty clothes from yesterday, with a store.

* * *

Shopping without an entourage was a lonesome affair. The store clerk eyed Percy with suspicion when he came in from outside—something to do with his ratty sweatshirt, rumpled black jeans, and worn out boots. She warmed up considerably when he flashed his credit card and said, “I hope you make commission. I’m here to rebuild my self-esteem, at whatever cost.”

She introduced herself as Clara. Clara took his measurements with a strip of measuring tape that she kept draped across her shoulders. She took Percy on the full tour. They loaded their arms with blazers and slacks and scarves and sweaters. Percy picked out a double-breasted coat with a thick, warm lining and gold buttons sewn onto the navy fabric. While he tried on a pair of leather shoes (“oxfords” she called them) she gathered new socks and hung his changing room with button-up shirts. 

The pile of clothing heaped on the checkout counter proved too much to carry, so he bought a suitcase, too.

The final tally on the register would have made Vex’s heart stop. Percy handed over Frederick’s card and photo ID with a calm smile. He hardly considered it real money, much less _his_ money. 

Of secondary importance, but equal urgency, was the barber. New York City had an infinite number of barbers, but Percy recalled Zack from the bar raving about one a few blocks from the Met, and Zack always had the clean-cut appearance of a man who had just come from an interview. Percy knew to ask for the young man named Jeremiah, who waved him over and sat him in a chair by the window. Obligingly, Percy wheeled his suitcase across the room and climbed into the swivel chair.

“I know you,” said Jeremiah, in a way that seemed almost ominous. 

He had a pair of bulky headphones hanging around his neck, with music playing just loud enough for Percy to hear. Jeremiah’s fashion had a deliberate casualness about it. He had rolled his sleeves up to the elbow, and his button-up hung untucked around his waist, but all without a single wrinkle to be seen. Percy caught a glimpse of the intricate tattoos across his forearms before Jeremiah spun his chair around to face the mirror.

Percy sighed in resignation. “I understand it’s a barber’s job to know things. Zack, I presume?”

“I don’t reveal my sources... but yeah, my buddy Zack.” He laughed a full, light laugh. Percy caught himself smiling at the sound. “He told me about the young dude with the white hair who never heard of paper money.”

“I’ve come a long way since then,” he said. “It’s Freddy, by the way.”

With a flourish, Jeremiah draped a black vinyl cloth over Percy’s front and tied it off around his neck. “Well Freddy, let’s see if we can’t get you a little further…”

In the past, at least since first leaving Whitestone, Percy had mostly cut his own hair (except for once, when he’d let Vex do it while they were both drunk, which had been a hilarious mistake). This level of tangled wildness reached far beyond his capability—just looking at his reflection had been almost overwhelming. So he sat back, closed his eyes, and put his trust in this stranger. Jeremiah took the hint. Whistling to the song that blared from the headphones around his neck, he grabbed a spray bottle, a pair of shears, and started clipping.

Percy peeked twice—first when a shower of mist wafted over his head at the sound of the spray bottle. Then again a few minutes later, when the sound of a high-pitched buzzing took over from the metal snipping. He opened one eye in time to see Jeremiah closing in on him with the foreign object that was causing the sound. It was a handheld instrument, silver and black.

“You good, man?” said Jeremiah, voice elevated over the music and the buzzing. He ran a hand over his own chin to indicate what he was doing. “Just taking a bit of the grandpa out. I won’t do it clean though, that all right?”

Percy almost nodded, then thought better of it with the blades so close to his head. “I defer to you entirely.”

He could feel the hands gently nudging him as Jeremiah moved about the chair. The repetitive motion of the comb along the back of his skull made a faint chill sneak down his spine. It was a strange thing, to be touched. Percy thought of how Vex used to skim her nails up the back of his head when they were sitting idle or reading—like the comb, but in reverse. The warmth of nostalgia commingled with that little nougat of cold in his chest. 

Occasionally Percy heard the soft sounds of hair falling onto the vinyl sheet, almost inaudible over the low rhythm of music from the headphones. Jeremiah was half-mumbling, half-singing behind him, like he didn’t know he was doing it. The back of Percy’s head vibrated when the grooming tool made its way up that way, then by the sides of his ears. At one point he may have even dozed off. It seemed like no time had passed by the time that Jeremiah was undoing the knot on the sheet and dusting off the back of his neck with a brush.

“Aaaaand you are done, sir.”

Bracing himself, wishing he had been a little specific about what he wanted—or more, what he didn’t want—he opened his eyes to look at what Jeremiah had done. There, looking back at him, was Percival de Rolo. A bit on the thin side, and far too gaunt, but it was his own face. 

“I think we shaved about forty years off of you, Freddy,” Jeremiah said.

He wasn’t wrong. He had trimmed his beard down to just a scruff, like Percy used to wear in the adventuring days. The close-cut hair on the sides of his head was far shorter than the top, which was also rather short. Different than he was used to, but Percy didn’t _dislike_ it. It certainly blended in much better than how he’d looked before. And if he was going to be stuck here a little longer, he might as well scavenge some of the dignity he’d lost along the way. 

Percy breathed a relieved sigh and reached one hand over his shoulder. Jeremiah shook it, his grip confident.

“Thank you. That’s much improved. I feel almost like myself again.”

“A good haircut can have that effect on people.”

Percy paid, tipped far too much, and headed out with a backwards wave when Jeremiah called out “I’ll see you in six weeks!”

Kima hadn’t returned by the time he wheeled his suitcase into the apartment. She’d been back, though—on top of his notebook, he found a cell phone. The screen showed a series of messages that he had to assume were from Kima:

_2:14 p.m.: this is ur phone now. if u get back before im done at the gym just text me and we can meet up somewhere after_

_2:14 p.m.: or u can come watch if u want_

_2:16 p.m.: if u don’t know how to send a message, just open the phone and click on the green button. i put it in the middle of the screen. then just tap my name and start writing_

_2:17 p.m.: well not that exactly but ure smart, just mess around with it until it works_

_2:25 p.m.: btw i saw u have an ipod… very 2004 of you lmao_

_2:33 p.m.: that’s like 15 years ago btw_

_2:34 p.m.: i’ll show u how to stream music from the phone tonight so u can level up_

Percy took little personal interest in learning to use the phone (though, admittedly, more than he would have had just yesterday). At least now he could perform internet searches without having to go to a public computer. As a test run, he looked up how to get the wrinkles out of all the shirts Clara had folded into his new suitcase.

Once his neck had grown stiff from staring down at the phone in his lap, Percy took the liberty of a second shower—officially, to get rid of all the little itchy hairs that fell under his collar during the haircut. Unofficially, because he had the growing suspicion that alcohol withdrawal could set in at any moment, and the heat made his head feel less like a pressure bomb. A few swigs from the canteen helped to expedite that relief. 

Percy was not ready to confront sobriety _just_ yet. Soon, though. Kima’s unexpected arrival in his life had set him with a newfound clarity. He no longer wanted to be drunk, but he had so much to do that he didn’t have the time to get sober all at once.

Percy spent some time thinking over the best approach while he got ready to leave. He found himself moving slowly throughout the apartment, preparing in a hodgepodge fashion—pull on underwear and an undershirt, open a fresh page in his notebook, hang his clothes, look for the ironing board (miraculous that she owned one), jot down some notes while the iron heated, press his shirt, find scissors to clip the tag, shirt on, set some timers on his phone, iron trousers, and so on. 

Kima lived a few blocks from the gym, which was a good thing, since by the time he’d learned from the internet how to knot a tie, it was time to meet her there. She had just climbed into the ring with Joe when he let himself in. She gave Percy a curious glance and a wave when she saw him enter. As with last time, the man with the suit and the sunglasses on top of his head was hovering just outside the ropes, watching the fighters attentively. Percy straightened his own coat with a glint of satisfaction.

“It’s Randy, right?” 

Percy offered a hand, and the man took it hesitantly, looking surprised. “You are—?”

“Call me Freddy.”

“Freddy?” The man did a double-take. “The guy from yesterday?”

Percy bowed his head at the tone of disbelief. “You caught me at a bad time yesterday, I’m afraid. Are you this gentleman’s coach?” he said, gesturing to the man that Kima had just put in a headlock.

“His sponsor. Joe’s still up-and-coming,” Randy sighed, “but I think this might be his year. He just needs a little more experience.”

“So Katie is his coach?”

“No. She just does some training on the side… keeps us all from getting cocky.”

They both turned to see how the fight was progressing. Despite being several times smaller than her opponent, Kima had Joe bent over double with her legs wrapped around him. She was wailing on him with one fist while shouting instructions about how to break the grapple.

“You know each other long?” asked Randy, seemingly because he had nothing else to do at the moment.

“We’re old friends,” Percy said, “but we’ve only just reacquainted.”

Randy’s hands moved towards his trouser pockets. When his arms pushed the coat aside, Percy caught the flash of a black handle on his belt. Randy saw the surprise as it crossed Percy’s face.

“Got a problem?” Randy said, in a warning tone.

“Not at all. I’m actually in the market myself. May I—?”

Randy hesitated, eyeing him a moment longer before he drew the handgun from the holster on his hip. He slid the magazine out of the handle and passed the gun wordlessly to Percy, who took it in both hands. The light weight of it surprised him. He inspected the barrel, the empty chamber. The design was sleek, with a polished finish, but it was artless in its design. Cold steel and hard lines.

“It’s not my favorite, but it’s the easiest for concealed carry,” Randy said. “Things start to get bulky when you get beyond a certain range. What are you looking for? Portability? Power?”

“I’m open to suggestion,” said Percy, not taking his eyes from his inspection. He raised the gun toward the far wall and aimed down the sights. “How’s the recoil?”

“Eh, s’all right. Not great for a handgun, honestly. You seem comfortable enough with it. Ever shot before?”

“Not in some time. I’m sure I’d be rusty, but I’d be curious to try—”

“Don’t let him bullshit you, Randy,” came Kima’s voice from the platform. “I’ve seen him land a headshot from twelve hundred feet!”

The two men both turned to find her slipping out from under the ropes. Behind her, Joe was limping to a corner of the fighting ring, one hand clutched over his bleeding nose. Kima gathered up her things where she had dumped them next to the ring and jogged over next to Percy.

“Look at you, brooks brothers!” she teased, slapping him on the shoulder. “Off the hobo train, I see.”

Percy uttered a hollow laugh. “Not quite. I’ve spent all my rent money, so I’m like to be homeless in a few weeks.”

“Don’t worry buddy, I won’t let you starve.”

Randy’s eyebrows rose. “How is it you know each other?”

“Uh,” said Kima, as Percy said, “The military.”

Flipping the gun into the air, Percy caught it by the barrel and offered it back, handle-first. “But honorary discharge was so long ago, I could have been a different person. I’d be curious to dust off a bit, if you knew of a place.”

“You got a pistol permit?” Randy said, taking the gun back while simultaneously reaching into his breast pocket to hand Kima a roll of paper money.

“No.” 

Percy had checked almost as soon as he’d learned of the existence of firearms. He still hadn’t decided whether he was disappointed in Frederick, or proud. Based on what he’d learned about this realm, it depended on where you lived.

“You won’t get far without one,” said Randy. “Even in a range, you can’t shoot anything more than a twenty-two revolver without a permit.”

“That’s too bad,” Percy said. “I’d have paid a lot for the chance to try something more interesting… a course, perhaps. Even rubber bullets would do for marksmanship purposes…” He let his sentence fade off with a shrug. 

Randy did not let the silence linger long. “There might be a place,” he sniffed, “for the right people, at the right price.”

“Sure.”

Kima sighed loudly from down by Percy’s elbow. “You guys are really subtle, but we need a rain check on the illegal underground shooting range. Freddy here owes me dinner, and I’m starving.”

“Do I now—?”

Before Percy had a chance to object, Kima had set a hand on the small of his back and begun to steer him off with unsurprising but notable strength. It was all Percy could do look back and call out “Perhaps next week,” before they’d reached the door. There was a good chance that Kima had drowned him out by shouting “Ice that shoulder, Joe!” at the same time.

“I was in the middle of something,” Percy said, once they had gone down the back steps of the building.

Her car was parked where they had left it last night. The only difference in how they’d left it was that it now had four orange tickets stuffed under the front windshield wiper.

“We don’t have time for hobbies right now,” Kima said, as she gathered up the tickets and shoved them in a pocket. “We should be strategizing on how to get the hell out of here!”

“The range was… a part of my strategy. I want to test a theory. Or at least rule one out.”

“Oh. Oops.” Their car doors closed, and the engine thrummed to life. “Well I am actually starving, so let’s get dinner.”

Traveling by car was so much different than on foot. Percy was lost within a few minutes of passing streets, and once they climbed out of the car, it took a few minutes to figure out what part of town they were in.

The same endless swath of strangers flowed around them as they walked the blocks from her parking space to the restaurant, bundled up against the autumn night. The outside of the restaurant didn’t catch his eye, but inside, over a dozen people sat in couples and groups at closely-laid tables. Smells of cooking food mixed with the sounds of easy conversation in a way that made the space seem warmer than it was. The hostess somehow had Kima’s name already and sat them at a small wooden table by the venue’s only window. A glass light fixture overhead cast a yellowed light over their table, shading the darkened exterior from view. They hung their jackets and Percy’s scarf, but Kima kept her hat on.

“So,” Kima said, in that quasi-joking manner one might use to raise the topic of weather when an uncomfortable subject needed addressing. She unfolded her menu and scanned it, only paying half attention. “How do you like the city?”

“I hate it,” said Percy.

Her eyebrows rose. “Really? I’d have thought with all the cool gadgets and technology and stuff, you’d be like a kid on Christmas—uh, do you know what Christmas is?”

Ignoring her question, he answered, “This place is like a noisy, war-plagued Hell designed to make every creative thought I’ve ever had look as blasé as a can opener.”

Kima turned a page of her menu. “We don’t even have _cans_ where we come from, so the can opener is actually kind of cool if you ask me.”

“If you’d rather stay here with your can openers, I’m sure Allura would understand—”

“I was _joking_ , Percy, jeez,” she said.

“Yes, well… you’re not wrong about this place, either,” Percy grumbled. “It has a lot to offer to someone with the proper vision.”

He let her order for him. Before the waiter could run off with his notepad, though, Percy stopped him.

“One more thing,” he said apologetically. “Could I get a drink as well, perhaps?”

The young man lifted his pad and pencil in attention. 

“Can we not?” Kima said, in a tone that clearly said ‘can _you_ not?’

“I think we should, actually,” Percy answered, not responding to her hint. He turned back to the waiter. “One of whatever you recommend with the entree, please.”

“How about a saison? It’s good with the Pad Thai.”

Percy had no frame of reference for either the drink or the food, so he said, “Perfect. Thank you.”

He watched the waiter retreat, ignoring the way that Kima was glaring at him from across the small table.

“You need to take it down a notch,” said Kima, after it had become apparent that he was not going to take her invitation to argument without further provocation.

Percy unfurled his dinnerware from its wrap, flicked the napkin out to the side, and laid it across his lap. “I intend to take it down several notches,” he said. “And you’ve got no right to scold anyone for bad habits—” He pointedly tapped the side of his nose.

Kima scoffed. “That was yesterday. I don’t need that shit to get me ready for a fight. I have the Platinum Dragon behind me.”

“That’s good for _you_ , isn’t it? But unless you want me laid up for two weeks, you’re going to have to exercise a little patience.”

Percy ducked down to his shoulder bag under the table, and came back up with his notebook. He opened it to the most recent page and slid it across for her.

“I’ve got a schedule written out. See? A good old-fashioned cold turkey detox can put you out of commission for weeks. But I’ve done a bit of reading… three days of drinking certain amounts at certain intervals, and I’ll be fine. I’ve already started, and it seems to be working.”

Kima spent several moments inspecting his tapering schedule. When she was done, she spun the notebook back at him and shook her head in what could have been amusement, if she didn’t look so sour about it. 

“Unbelievable,” she said. “But you know yourself best, I guess, so if it works...”

Percy did know himself best. He also knew from the way his limbs had begun to tremble, just a little bit, that he was already behind schedule. He stowed his hands out of sight until the waiter returned with a bottle of ale and an empty glass, at which point he poured and drank most of it down without tasting it. Kima was watching him, of course; she probably noticed how quickly he rushed to get it down, but he didn’t pay her any mind. 

Almost at once, the alcohol smoothed out the tremor and his piquing sense of anxiety, chasing off the symptoms of withdrawal. Percy breathed a shallow, relieved sigh. Three days and he’d be done with this.

“It’s not what I intended to happen,” he said, folding his hands on the table.

“Has it been like this the whole time?” Kima asked. She was gripping a spoon in her right hand, her thumb pressed hard against the head, as if she were trying to bend it over. 

“Oh, no. Only long enough to make things difficult for myself. Four weeks and change.” When she continued to look unconvinced, he said, “Things started off all right, but... chasing down clues that don’t lead anywhere... it starts to turn up other things.” Percy cleared his throat. “Anyway, I didn’t do it on purpose.”

The thought of confessing his moments of doubt brought on too much shame, so he left it there. Kima had only just awoken to this process—he couldn’t deplete her optimism like that. With two of them now to tackle this thing, he hoped she wouldn’t have the chance to find herself in that situation. 

Regardless of what he intended to relay, Kima seemed to grasp at the truth of it. Her posture softened, grip loosening on the spoon. She set it down on the table and said, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said dismissively. “Things are different now that you’re here. Having two of us in this place really narrows the pool of theories.”

“What are the theories?” Kima asked.

“There are many.”

“Give me the top three.”

“All right.” Percy tapped his fingers on the tabletop, thinking. “Let’s tackle the spectrum from most to least horrible. Worst case: our lives before this are fictitious stories that someone has transplanted into our brains as a horrible social or scientific experiment.”

“Nope, that theory sucks.”

“Agreed. Second theory: something happened back home to alter our respective realities. This would mean that everything we lived was real, but that something changed, and this is our new reality.”

The waiter returned with a plate balanced in each hand. They fell silent as he placed each entree in front of them, warning them that the plates were hot. The noodles and colorful vegetables in their sauce gave off a steam with a pleasant, nutty scent. Percy felt a twinge in his stomach that he recognized as his long-lost appetite.

“So a plane shift,” Kima said, picking up her utensils as Percy thanked the retreating waiter. “Like, for everyone, or just us?”

“I don’t know. Definitely for us, which could mean any number of outcomes—our people back home are very confused, or forgot we exist, or have also changed realities. Or maybe that our entire plane was wiped from existence.”

“That’s still pretty bad.” She heaped half of her rice into her bowl of orange curry. “So the best case is, we’ve just been transported here for some reason and everything back home is the same, and we just have to get there.”

Percy gave a half-shrug as he went in for a taste of his dinner. “More or less.”

“So how did we get here, then? And why hasn’t Allie sent me a message? She could send a message from anywhere, even from home.”

“I don’t know. Some sort of planar obstacle, I suspect. There’s no magic on this—”

“Oh, _gods_.”

Kima had just taken a mouthful of food when she clapped a hand over her chest. Percy’s heart stuttered in alarm. He hadn’t gotten to the part of the story where he told her his concerns about them being monitored. But now it occurred to him, as he watched her eyes flutter closed, that he wouldn’t get to tell her anything if she was poisoned.

She was still chewing, though, which was odd. 

“What is it?” he demanded. “Are you all right?”

Her eyes opened, and in a near whisper with her mouth full, she said, “I forgot how much I love chicken.”

Taking her time in spite of Percy’s visible shock, Kima finished chewing her bite before she explained herself. “Katie mostly eats plants and stuff. Vegetables, whole grains. No meat.” 

Percy drooped in his chair, covered his face with his hands, and laughed in relief. The sensation of it was neither foreign nor familiar, but at the very least, it felt good. He rubbed his eyes and smoothed his hands through his hair, shaking his head incredulously. When he had finally recovered, Kima was grinning at him, another piece of chicken already stuck on the end of her fork.

“How about that,” she said to him. “I guess it really _is_ you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes you gotta write compelling fight scenes and romance and stuff... and sometimes... you just gotta spend 6k words talking about showering and haircuts in painstaking detail. I don't know why I do these things to myself. Thanks for hanging with me through it!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter??? In MY fic? It's more likely than you think!

Chapter 6

The research had resumed in earnest. Percy slogged through his tapering schedule, insomniatic and increasingly disgusted by the cans of Natural Ice that Kima tossed him every few hours. The crack of the aluminum tab and the smell of this foul beer was enough to make him nauseous by the second day. At this point, he was glad about the increasing time between drinks.

The alarm went off on their phones, signaling the time for another beer. Percy sighed resignedly as Kima overhanded him a room-temperature can. The fizz sprayed and dripped onto the table as he popped it open.

“You know I hate you, right?” Percy said, pouring the beer into a stein because, even sitting on the floor in sweatpants, he still had certain standards. Never mind that the stein was imprinted with a smiling poo emoji.

“Don’t care. This is medicine.”

“It tastes like medicine.”

Actually, the flavor more closely resembled the potion of fire resistance than a healing potion—something about the rank aftertaste.

“No complaining,” Kima said, once Percy had set his empty glass down in disgust.

She wouldn’t hear a true complaint out of him. All things considered, things were looking up for Percy at the moment. He was housebound for the next few days, but that was fine. Percy had found comfort in his makeshift nest in the living room, wrapped up in a blanket atop a pile of cushions on the floor. The coffee table had become his desk, and Kima had kept her promise to show him where to find more music. While bent over a (purportedly fictional) book about the adventures of halflings, with his hood pulled up and his headphones in, he could almost forget that he had the sweats.

Kima, on the other hand, had some adjusting to do. At the moment, she sat cross-legged with her laptop balanced on one of the couch’s armrests. She had taken the day off to monitor him and spent most of the time searching through social media websites in search of others trapped on this plane. No luck, of course, but he admired her optimism. It was her familiar agitation that Percy found disconcerting. She had the same borderline obsessive drive that had steered him straight through weeks of sleuthing and straight into burnout. Her energy radiated restlessness, a direct counter to Percy’s studious withdrawal.

Even in this motivated state, Kima lacked the capacity to sit and study for hours and hours at a time. After just an hour or two, the sounds of her grumbling and shifting around started up. Percy was silently grateful that she still had responsibilities and jobs to attend to while he was trapped in the apartment for a few days. She had daily personal training clients, group fitness classes, workouts of her own, and the occasional mock fight. He was still not sure how all of those jobs made enough to pay the rent, much less the payment on her car. Her schedule was irregular, but whenever she came home, she had dark sweat stains on her clothes and she reeked of body odor. 

Sometimes she brought books from the library, if he sent her with a list or shot her a text while she was out. She’d throw her gym bag on the couch and settle down at her laptop with a bowl of mixed grains and nuts and leafy greens. Percy never asked whether it was Kima or Katie’s preference speaking. 

He sweated through the three long days of fending off withdrawal. The headache didn’t bother him as much as the niggling, anxious feeling. It had a hollowness to it, but it nagged like an alarm in the back of his mind. An alert to remind him that he had forgotten to do something that he had no chance of recalling. Telling himself that it was temporary gave him little comfort—logically, he knew that it was just a side-effect. That was the nature of the thing, though. The feeling didn’t care one way or the other. 

More even than that, though, Percy feared the return of his dreams. His little habit had given him the gift of sleep without memory. Now he couldn’t sleep at all—another temporary setback, almost preferable to what he worried might come on the other side. Maybe Kima’s appearance in his life would stave off the worst of it. He dared to hope, but either way, it didn’t matter. Percy was done running from his problems. 

He’d thought he was done before. Years and years before. Complacency could really catch up with you.

Just after midnight into the third day, he glanced up from a book to find Kima staring at him. She had her chin balanced on the palm of one hand, and the severe tilt in her posture told him that she was fighting unconsciousness. As their eyes met, she made no move to pretend that she hadn’t been watching.

“What?” he said. 

She blinked back to life at the sound of his voice, her shoulders straightening into their normal, hard posture. Her hair had begun to come lose from its braid. When she brushed it over her shoulder, it unwound even further. 

“Do you remember the first thing you did when we met?” she said.

Kima didn’t seem to be inviting an answer, so Percy didn’t respond. He just looked at her, blank-faced.

“You told Grog to cover my ears.” Her voice had a little loft to it, and unless he was mistaken, an edge of tearfulness. “And then you shot off my manacles.”

“What about it?” 

“Is that what happened?

“Yes,” Percy said, setting his book aside. “Why?”

Then Kima laughed a little. He had been right about the strain in her voice—her laugh had it, too. “I just remembered it for the first time,” she said, catching a tear in the corner of her eye before it could well up. “My past is popping back into my head, but all the other stuff is still there. Katie’s whole life, I remember it like it really happened.” 

More than once, he had wondered whether their alter egos had been real people, or whether they had sprung into universe like water from the bottom of a well when the planes shifted them here. Frederick Zimmerman had led such a hollow life—just enough that the universe could paint Percy over it like a thin veneer. Frederick had dozens of acquaintances but no relationships. He had a history but no family. By all accounts, he had been a reclusive, solitary creature who could have died without drawing notice from anyone.

Katie really seemed to exist. She had clients and friends and a reputation. She had skills, and the little contradictions that made a person a person—she liked fast cars, preferred vegetables to burgers, snorted cocaine to get ready for a brawl. 

“Maybe it _was_ yours. Before Kima took over,” Percy offered, knowing it was unhelpful, but it was honest. “What’s the first thing you remember when you first woke up?”

“Just... waking up a little bit, then falling back asleep and waking up a few more times. I was in the hospital, but that was from the accident. And I’m still a little fuzzy on the first few days.”

“Which hospital?”

“Saint Martha’s. Down by Battery Park.”

An entirely different hospital system than the one that had taken Percy in. But still, a lead they hadn’t followed yet.

“We should try to get your medical records. If we compare them to mine, maybe there’s some overlap in our providers.”

“Yeah, maybe. Ugh—it’s so confusing… I know in my head what memories are really mine, but some of them are clashing…” 

Kima closed her laptop and tossed it aside. Rising from the couch, she stretched her hands over her head, reaching up until a shudder ran visibly over her body. She sniffed and said, “When we were in the bar, and I remembered who I was, it was the craziest feeling… everything crashing back in like that…” Her arms fell back down. “Katie’s never loved anyone.”

She avoided his eye when she said it. Percy tilted his head. “In that case, she’s lucky you’re carrying her memory.” 

“I don’t want it,” Kima said stubbornly. “I miss my wife.”

Grabbing up her laptop and phone, Kima went off to her room for the night, leaving Percy alone. He took his time shifting everything onto the couch that was his makeshift bed now that Kima was no longer occupying it. He had a blanket draped over his shoulders like a cloak, and he wound it tighter around himself before falling sideways onto the couch. His back groaned in relief when his head hit the pillow. 

Percy’s eyes were in a perpetual state of burning, but he grabbed the next book from the top of his pile, holding it open over his face so he could read while lying prone.

“Welcome to the club.”

* * *

The last of the symptoms bled out of Percy’s central nervous system, and with the return of his faculties, Percy and Kima settled into their routine. 

In the morning, the door of the bedroom swung open to let a groggy Kima shuffle her way to the bathroom. By then, Percy had made a pot of coffee and could be found sitting at the kitchen table with his notebook, already showered and dressed to go out. They discussed the day’s strategy while sipping from mugs printed with the faded names of places she’d visited—Las Vegas, Yellowstone, the Alamo. Sometimes they had breakfast together. More often, Kima stopped on her way into work for a bagel sandwich from the corner deli. 

“New York bagels are by far the best thing on this plane of existence,” Kima said, when Percy asked what was so great about some boiled dough. “The whole grain ones are even pretty good. Not that I’m sticking to those these days.”

Percy didn’t understand the appeal of the bagels (though the lox and cream cheese were, admittedly, worthwhile with or without the bagel), but he didn’t begrudge her the habit. Between her jobs and her own training, Kima could use whatever grains she could get, whole or otherwise. Percy on the other hand had regained his grasp on sobriety, his senses, and not much else. The strength had left him during the ordeal, leaving him wasted and tired but rarely hungry. He was better, for sure—he had Kima to thank for that—but the dreadful, creeping thing that had hollowed out his chest remained burrowed there. It at least was buried, for now. He turned resolutely to his research to keep it from clawing back out again.

During the day, Percy went out in search for leads—usually to a library, but not always. He often wound up in odd places like university museums and pawn shops when the books threatened to yield a useful lead. Kima often joined him, and guided them, on these ventures. She had an entire lifetime of memories from growing up in the city, which meant she came up with ideas that he could never fathom. The follow-through never turned up anything, though. Once he and Kima had exhausted the initial expanse of new possibilities, they landed where Percy had started... or not entirely, but something like it.

For his part, Percy sat and read and wrote his notes. It was his default setting—how Kima found him in the morning, and where she left him at night. The only time she saw him without his accoutrement of paper was at suppertime, and sometimes not even then. Since neither of them could cook anything more palatable than a box of pasta, they either had takeout or went to dinner most every day. Even out at a restaurant, Percy was shameless—if a thought occurred to him, or he wanted to be more specific when telling Kima about his work from the day, he’d whip out one of the books and start reading.

That sensation of running in circles had begun to creep back into his life, but at least he could look at Kima and believe that it had all been real. She tethered him to reality, and in turn, he did his best to shield her from the possibility that they might never see home again.

He had mixed success on that front. Kima still had her own grieving to do. Her moods fluctuated from wildly optimistic to downright angry. She could go from planning what she’d do when she got home to ranting about the injustice of their position within the span of ten minutes. In Percy’s view, her outward-facing anger felt much more appropriate than it had for him. Kima had the benefit of an untouched, unencumbered soul.

When her request for medical records came back as a denial because she’d missed one signature place on the form, she’d torn the letter apart and flushed it down the toilet. Then she calmly returned, mailed out a new form with all the right signatures, and disappeared to her room to watch television. The muffled dialogue and music could ebb out from behind the door for hours. He had to assume she was falling asleep while watching. Sometimes she hung out with him in the living room and watched her shows on her phone or laptop instead, after she had tapped out on work and research for the day. Other times she retreated to her own space. More than once, she tried to get him to indulge in it with her.

“You sure you don’t wanna watch?” she said, on her way across the apartment. “It’s a good series. Like a western, but in outer space.”

“No, thank you,” was always the cordial reply.

On one such occasion over a week into their coexistence, Kima was sitting on the loveseat when she looked up from her phone and said (too loudly with the headphones in), “You really don’t have any hobbies?”

Percy turned a page in his book. “Not here.”

“You haven’t watched _any_ tv?”

“I watched some documentaries that I thought could be helpful.”

“What about your little side-projects that you always have? Don’t you wanna build something or... something?”

“No.”

Kima rolled her eyes at what she must have thought was Percy being purposefully dense. “You’re going to burn out if you don’t do anything else ever.”

“The faster we find the answer, the faster we get back to our respective hobbies,” he said, with a spared glance over the top of _Mysteries of Magic and Alien Relics_. He didn’t think it worth saying that he was already so burned out that he might as well keep going.

She didn’t force the subject. Instead, Kima rolled onto her feet and retreated to her bedroom with a casual, “Your loss!”

An hour later, the creak of the bedroom door drew his attention away from his book. Kima had reappeared, looking more irritated than normal.

“Hey, so my light is doing this... thing. It’s flashing and it’s really annoying. Can you take a look at it?”

Percy eyed her suspiciously. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know! You’re the one with the... you know!” Kima made a vague hand gesture and said, in a huff of breath, “Can you please just look at it?”

“All right...”

Setting aside the book and a stack of papers, he pushed himself to his feet. Percy stumbled at first—his legs had gone stiff from sitting so long—but he shook it off and followed. 

He had never been in her room, and had never so much as peered inside. At once he saw that it was the embodiment of a crisis. The window cast the only dim light, but it was enough for him to see the extent of Kima’s dysfunction. The only places not covered by dirty clothes on the floor, the desk, the dresser, and even the bed were strewn with dirty dishes and garbage. Empty granola bar wrappers, apple cores, clear plastic cereal bags. Multiple bowls with some opaque liquid congealed at the bottom, the spoon stuck inside as if with glue. The sight of it made him stutter-stop in the doorway.

“Kima...” Percy said cautiously, “is this how you live all the time?”

She had hopped over the bed to the outlet on the opposite side, nearly tripping over a laundry pile. It was miraculous that she had any clean clothes to wear.

“Why? What’s your problem with it?”

Percy couldn’t tell whether she sounded defensive or not. He bent to pick up the closest item, which he thought was a sock but turned out to be a blackened banana peel. It dangled from his fingertips and swayed in a sad semicircle.

“Nothing,” he said, brandishing the withered peel, “except that it smells an awful lot like intervention in here. Are you collecting those for some reason?”

She followed his pointing to a pile of protein shake bottles on the ground.

“So I need to tidy up a little. I’m busy! But look, this is what I wanted to show you—”

Kima turned the wall switch, and the overhead light flicked to life. Then it began to flash erratically. 

“It’s like a rave in here,” she said.

“I’m going to assume that was a joke,” Percy said. 

He climbed up onto the bed, his striped socks sinking into the unexpectedly soft mattress. Up close, the brightness of the erratic bulb near blinded him. He had to raise a hand to shield his eyes from it.

“Can you turn it off?”

Another click, and the room fell back to filtered window light. Gingerly, Percy unscrewed the cover and handed it down to Kima. Inside he found three glass bulbs fastened to a metal base.

He pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted at the fixture. “All right, let’s have a look here... do you by any chance have a screwdriver? Or any other tools?”

“Uhh... I think?” Kima looked around the disaster of her bedroom as if she expected to find it nearby. “Actually, I think I can do ya one better.”

While she darted off to unearth her tools from who knew where, Percy studied the bulbs and their settings. Electric lighting had been the first thing to catch his attention on this plane. Literally. Since then he hadn’t allowed himself the luxury of curiosity; the thought of tinkering for his own benefit while his family could be suffering left a certain taste in the back of his throat. If Kima needed a hand, though, how could be turn her down? He was just a freeloader, after all, who contributed little more to the household than occasionally washing a dish or two (and handing over the contents of his bank account, as he was wont to do). This was just manners.

To his surprise, the screws were loose enough to turn by finger. The base plate came free nearly on its own, exposing a string of wires running from the light and up into the dark cavity of the ceiling. He spent a few minutes acquainting himself with the configuration. It was not wholly unfamiliar—the Diplomacy glove had its own set of circuits, in some ways more intricate. The simplicity of this struck him as almost elegant. Six wires, two of each in three different colors, and a grounding wire. He took them one at a time, rolling them in his fingers in an effort to feel through the plastic casing. The problem became evident in only a few seconds: three of the wires had come free. Or more precisely, they had snapped somehow.

He’d been so engrossed in comparing the wires that he didn’t notice Kima return until she prodded his backside with something sharp.

“Here you go.” 

She had a small bucket in one hand, in which a random assortment of tools stood upright like a vase of flowers. In the other hand, she had what could have passed for an extremely cumbersome handgun.

“Is that a… power drill?” Percy said.

He had tried to keep is voice and face on even keel when he said it, but Kima was looking at him with too much smugness for him to think he’d succeeded. He took the drill from her and pulled the trigger to see what would happen. The sharp whirring sound and the kick of the spinning cylinder caught him off guard… and yet.

With some reluctance, Percy set the power drill on the mattress in exchange for a pair of wire strippers. “Thanks. I think I found the problem. It’s these three wires here— _ow!_ ” He jerked his hand away as a jolt leaped through his finger.

“You all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said, exasperated. Percy winced and shook out his hand, annoyed with himself for being both careless, and eager. “I’ve done much worse than that. Is there a, er, a circuit breaker? To cut the power? I think I can just splice it back together...”

It was really a simple fix. Percy took his time with it. He helped himself to the bucket of tools, first stripping both ends of the wires, then threading the ends together by hand. The odd nature in which it had supposedly come apart didn’t escape him. When he spread the dangling wires taught between his forefinger and thumb, the ends lined up in a neat row, but at an angle. As if someone had cut across them.

“Do you often have trouble with your lights?” he said nonchalantly to Kima, who was hovering down by his feet.

“Sometimes,” she answered. “The rats like to chew them, I think.”

“Sure, that makes sense,” said Percy. 

With a little tweaking from the pliers, and a few inches of electrical tape, the job was complete. Before reassembling the whole thing, he had Kima return power to the breaker and flip the wall switch. The light returned to all three bulbs, steady and strong. 

“Ah, that’s nice,” he said.

Percy mounted the base plate back on and used the power drill to screw the bolts back into place. The first one he almost stripped by accident when he let the drill bit slip off the bolt. The second one he pressed down too hard and almost cracked the base. On the third one, though, he got it just right.

As he hopped down from the bed, the light fixture fully restored, he couldn’t suppress the tiny, stubborn nougat of pride from pinging in his chest. Percy bit the inside of his lip to keep the smirk from revealing itself to Kima, but when he saw the knowing expression on her face, the corner of his mouth twitched out of its thin-pressed line and betrayed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "and they were roommates..."
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... much... editing... need sleep.

Chapter 7

Kima and Percy pressed on because they didn’t have another option. They spun and spun and spun.

Time was the factory whistle that called them to the beginning and end of the day. It was rigid, but that didn’t stop it from running through their fingers like water. They had a keen awareness that every day passing meant another day away from their families. To Percy, it was another day missed of watching his children grow. Another day for Cassandra to govern a city-state and wrangle her monsters alone. Another day for Vex to believe she had lost her mother, and her brother, and now him. 

Percy kept pushing his resources for new information, turning over increasingly unlikely stones.

And he fixed things. The apartment seemed to be in constant need of repair. At first, there were a few small jobs that he really believed Kima could have just been neglecting—the microwave not working, for one. Even the water dispenser in the fridge was something that he could see the ordinary tenant letting slide. But when he found a leak in the kitchen one day for no apparent reason, he had a little trouble masking his suspicion. That didn’t stop him from getting down on the floor with a new copper sauntering kit. Sure enough, when he slid under the sink on his back for a look, the pipe had a crack and a dent that couldn’t have appeared on its own.

Percy replaced the pipe, grateful to put his fretful hands to work, and said nothing. He wished he had a way of returning the favor. Kima desperately needed it.

Her resolute independence was starting to creep up on her. Katie had a certain schedule, and Kima’s arrival did little to change it. She woke up, worked, came home, helped out with the investigation, went to sleep, and did it again. At first Percy wondered whether anyone at her gym had noticed that she’d become an entirely different person overnight. He was curious enough that when Kima kept nagging him to go to one of her classes, he finally conceded. The excitement on her face at his reluctant acceptance had almost been worth the pain that followed the next morning, when he found himself in the very back of a class full of people, feeling foolish in his new outfit. He had no idea when she bought the gym clothes—she just threw them at his head early that morning while he was still dozing on the couch, and told him to put them on.

That had been Kima in the apartment. At the gym, Katie taught class. The difference between the two people was even starker now that he spent so much time with them both. She slipped into that other person with no effort at all; Kima stepped out, and Katie just stepped in. She was intense but jovial, like Kima, but she had a different kind of charisma. Percy would not have been able to picture Kima energetically counting out reps to the sounds of electronic music if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

“Having you in my class was kind of freaky,” she said afterward, on the walk back to the apartment. Katie was gone, now—or as gone as she ever got—and Kima was looking thoughtful about it.

“Was my form really that terrible?”

“Not what I meant, but kind of. Remind me later to show you a proper deadlift before you hurt your back.”

“So what, then?” Percy said quickly, eager to move on. "Was I distracting to you?"

“Uh, not really distracting… more like, I was in the zone, and then I saw you, and I kind of… forgot what I was doing for a second?”

“Huh.” He hadn’t noticed it happen. Then again, he had been busy trying to figure out what he was supposed to be doing. “Did it feel like Kima interrupting a Katie moment?”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s exactly what it was like.”

“I wouldn’t want to cause you undue stress during your working hours. Perhaps I shouldn’t attend any more classes—”

Kima elbowed him in the leg, which did not help his already sore muscles. “Nice try, de Rolo. I was going to say I _liked_ it. I felt more like me.”

“Well that’s nice. But I’m not about to start coming along to all of your classes.”

“You couldn’t afford it.”

The weeks began to blur together. The longer this went, the more Percy saw that she was toeing a risky line. Kima was never solely Kima. There were parts of this plane that had bled into her persona that she couldn’t blot out. Her constant switching came with a cost that she couldn’t measure, but it became visible the moment she stepped out of view from the people Katie interacted with. A tiredness came over her that he knew all too well.

He tried to raise the topic, but she brushed him off, too stubborn to acknowledge that something was wrong. Percy began to notice her dressing in the same clothes he’d seen from her floor, without any indication that she had washed them. The cabinet soon had little left in terms of dishware; most of it had found its way to her bedroom, never to leave again. Kima seemed to think that she could work so hard at her job that the issue would resolve itself. Her hours at work were getting longer, her affect flatter. 

Finally, one day, she came home with drying blood smeared down her nose and her eye swollen halfway shut.

“Joe finally got me,” she said when Percy saw her.

Kima should have been pleased—and under normal circumstances, he knew she would have been. Joe’s success in the ring, after all, came from her coaching. (And she got her fee whether she won the fight or not.)

Kima walked past Percy and into the bedroom before he had the chance to interject. The door closed behind her, too quietly. Percy listened from the living room for over an hour, pretending to read, waiting for the sound of the television or any other movement.

At last, he stood and went into the kitchen. Percy laid a clean dish towel on the counter, piled ice cubes in the center, then gathered the ends up and twisted them together to make a little pouch. Once he’d secured them with an elastic band, he crossed back over and, for the first time, knocked on Kima’s door.

No answer. Percy rested his fingers on the knob, lightly, and tried to test the lock. It turned without resistance.

“Kima,” he said through the door. When the silence continued, he announced, “I’m coming in now.”

Inside the darkened room, Percy found Kima where he expected to—fully dressed on the bed, on top of the covers and the other debris that had accumulated there. The pillow obscured her face from view. She didn’t respond to the sound of his approach, but he could see that she was conscious. The haggardness of her breath became evident once he got within arm’s reach.

“Kima,” he said again, to let her know that he was there.

“I let him do it,” said Kima in a thick voice, the anger simmering just below.

“I know.”

She picked up her head off the pillow enough to glare at him with one eye—the swollen one, with the black smudge growing beneath the socket. Tears had run down and mingled with the blood, smearing it on the green pillowcase.

“You know fucking everything, don’t you?” she snapped.

“No.”

Percy moved closer to the bed. “I don’t know how to get us home. And I don’t know what it’s like to have two people living in my head. But I do know this: if I’d had someone who could punch me in the face, I would have done the same.” 

He lifted the back of his hand to show her the reddened scars on his knuckles, from when he had slammed his fist into the floor until it was raw and ruined. Weeks had passed and he still couldn’t clench his hand with full strength. He feared, in an impassive way, that he had done permanent damage to a tendon. 

Percy let that hand fall to his side in exchange for the other, holding up the homemade ice pack. “Take this.”

Kima continued to stare for several long seconds more, the iris peering out from the slit of an eyelid. Her brow gradually relaxed from its harsh and furrowed state. She reached out, took the ice from him, pressed it to her eye, and began to sob.

Percy couldn’t just leave her like this, but he didn’t want stand there and watch, either. Instead, he went out to the pantry for some garbage bags. For the next half an hour, he shuffled about the bedroom, collecting trash in one bag, recyclables in another. Percy gathered up the dishes, and the bowls, and the cups, and the utensils. He stacked them all together and carried them away to the kitchen, where he put them in the dishwasher or in the sink to soak. The clothes he heaped into a basket and brought to the washer in the entryway. By the time he was done, he had four trash bags full and lined up by the door. The dishwasher was sloshing away, and so was the first load of clothes—with another still waiting in the basket.

After Percy finished straightening the bedroom furniture, he went back to Kima’s side. She hadn’t moved, not even while he picked up all the debris from the bed, but the crying had given way to a pattern of shallow breaths. Hesitantly, he set a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it. 

Kima didn’t react to his touch. Percy worried for a moment that he’d crossed a boundary, but when he began to pull back, she let go of the ice pack and grabbed him by the wrist. The force of her grip almost made him wince. Without lifting her face, she pulled him down into a one-armed hug.

Percy tensed in surprise. There was something foreign about being held. At once he recalled the last time someone hugged him—in Whitestone, the night he disappeared. He had been in his workshop, tinkering with some of the more delicate components of his clock tower’s gear system when Vex stopped in to say goodnight. She’d been exhausted from the long ride home and her berry picking venture with the kids that morning. Seeing her standing there, framed by the dark wooden arch, head tiled to one side, had pulled her away from his bench. When he reached her, she’d slipped her arms around his waist and leaned into him with the heaviness of a person asleep on her feet. He’d hugged her tightly there in the doorway, and let the long comfortable silence stretch out around them…

Percy had to blink before he finally remembered himself. The room returned, along with the crushing force of Kima’s arm. He was standing, sort of bent over her. Half of her face pushed into the pillow, and the other half into his shoulder.

It was an awkward position, but he made it work. Percy wrapped an arm around her in his best semblance of an embrace. Cheek pressed to the top of her head, he clung with her same desperate strength, and didn’t let go until he felt her grip loosen on the back of his shirt. Slowly, he straightened up to back out of her space.

Percy coughed to clear the waver from his voice. “I’m going to make some soup.” What he meant was that he was going to open a can of soup and heat it up over the stove, but he trusted that she knew that. “I’ll leave it on the burner if you want some.”

Tucking herself back into the pillow, shielding her face with the ice pack, Kima nodded. Percy retreated, closing the door behind him. Back in the open space of the living room, he wiped his eyes on his sleeve and heaved a long, heavy sigh.

That night, he dreamed again. He’d done it more often since he tapered off, which reminded him why he’d let the indulgence become a crutch in the first place. Every night, he curled up beneath Kima’s spare blanket and wondered what nightmares might lie on the other side of his eyelids. The one thing he could count on was that Vex would be there. His silent companion, unwilling to meet his eye or look in his direction, dissolving at his touch and disappearing into blank space.

Sometimes Percy dreamed irrationalities about what might have happened to sever him from his plane. Vesper or Illia or Percival or Julia might be ripped from his arms and dragged, screaming, into a fog by masked faces. 

Tonight was his wedding. Percy had dreamed it before, but not in this place—his subconscious found him standing in his Earthen night clothes, on the cliff where they had fought Silas and the cultists. No one else was there, though, except Vex. 

Always Vex.

She appeared a hundred yards away, facing the opposite direction, off toward Dalen’s Closet. In his memory, she was in that stunning gown that had weighed her down as they drowned. Here in the dream, she had on the simple clothes that she might wear at home. Soft fabrics and faded leathers, loose and flowing. His chest constricted at the sight of her, in that same combination of yearning and sadness that always whelmed him when he saw her in his sleep. He tried to call her name, but couldn’t will his voice to rise. She wouldn’t acknowledge him anyway.

 _Gods, I’m so tired of this_. 

Percy tried to will the dream away and wake himself before the inevitable horrors began. He struggled for the helpless seconds, watching Vex look about, confused, until she finally turned around.

Their eyes met, and something happened. Like circuits sparking a connection between live wires.

His heart stammered at the consciousness between them. It lacked the wavy, ethereal presence of a dream. Vex felt it too. He saw the realization as it progressed from confusion and dawned over her elegant, half-elven features in slow motion. Her eyes went round, her face fell slack, and they regarded one another in near-palpable disbelief. The shock hung on longer than it should have as they stood there, deciding whether the images were just another joke from the subconscious mind.

Percy began to run. Vex, too, took off at a full sprint in his direction, her long braid whipping out behind her. The dry, yellowed dust kicked up around her ankles as she crossed the cliffside—too real to be a dream, he knew. The gap was closing. The gap didn’t close in his dreams. They were meters apart, then ten feet. He could almost touch her if he stuck out his hand and extended his body forward. What would happen if he did? Would she disappear like always?

Percy doubled down, dug in his feet, reached his hand out just as Vex began to lift her arm to him—

Time shifted, and they stopped without a stuttered halt. Percy willed his legs to step again, but they disobeyed him, standing still like stone. Not three paces away, Vex had done the same. Her chest heaved with breath and the effort of pushing through to him. She threw her fists at the invisible barrier, the strength gradually leaving her traitor arms, until finally they fell to her sides.

They might only have seconds. Unable to move, Percy tried to yell instead. The words came to his head all at once— _I’m in New York! On the planet known as Earth. In the Milky Way galaxy. I don’t know the name of the plane_ —but his mouth would not form them. Even now, he felt the feeling draining from his body, like a paralysis spell taking hold without a caster. There must have been tears in his eyes, even if he couldn’t feel it. They were pooling in Vex’s now, threatening to fall.

Percy could not move, he could not speak. So he stared, breathless. He fixed his gaze on Vex and refused to look away. Taking her in like it was the very the first time, or the last. With what little control he had left, he tried to say with his expression the words he couldn’t form: _It’s okay. I’m so sorry. I love you_. 

Vex’s stony expression seemed to crack. Percy saw it transition from anger and astonishment, to fear, and then despair. He thought at first that she might cry, but then, her mouth pressed into a hard line, and she gave him a _look_. He knew it better than he knew himself—her stubborn, unyielding determination. Vex managed the smallest nod; whether it was meant for him or, he couldn’t tell. He didn’t have the time to decide.

The ground between them split into a fine, jagged line. A sound had pitched up in the distance, far over the sea, an approaching torrent. Wafts of silt began to swarm them. Percy felt the sting on his skin, like tiny shards of glass that obscured his sight. Vex had begun to sway with the force of the breeze, her hair streaming. Their eyes refused to stray from one another, even once the sheet of sand had pulled up between them, launching them into obscurity. 

Long after she was gone, Percy fixated on the place where she had been, willing her to return, deaf and numb to the chaos. A loud crack clapped down over his head, and cast him into nothingness—no more sensation, no more sound. Just darkness and quiet, followed by the smell of… pizza?

Percy had fallen off the couch. On his way to the floor, his arm or his blanket had snagged the empty pizza box, which had turned over on his head. Chest heaving, Percy lifted it off and tossed it aside. Crumbs and dried up bits of mozzarella scattered across his lap as he shook his head. He sat back against the base of the couch, pressed his palms to his face, and tried to remember. Had he seen a sign? Another person? Some component of a spell, or a sigil? All he saw was Vex. There had been nothing else in the universe. Not a single thing.

* * *

In the morning, Percy stepped out onto the stone steps of the apartment to find them covered in a dusting of snow. Overnight the clouds had rolled in and left behind this thin sheet, perfectly crisp and even but for a set of small footprints marking Kima’s exit. She had stolen past him without the usual routine, the click of the front door serving as his wake-up call. 

A pair of squirrels were fighting with each other over rights to the garbage bin perched on the curb, seemingly alarmed by the change in weather. As for Percy, the sight of the fine white powder drew his breath out like a punch to the gut. He thought at once of Whitestone and its towering drifts, and the countless nights he’d spent watching snow fall from the comfort of his bedroom window. 

Taking care not to slip on the stone, Percy tugged his collar up around his neck and hurried down to the sidewalk. 

He’d meant to head downtown in search of a professor who studied witch burnings and the supposedly non-supernatural events precipitating them. When he reached the subway station, though, he took the uptown train instead and rode it north of Central Park. Most of the passengers crowded around him didn’t seem to care about the weather change. The woman standing to his left, scrolling through messages while swaying with the motion of the train, had flip-flops on her feet. 

The only other person who seemed to have it on her mind was a child on the other end of the car who kept loudly asking “Did it snow at school too, daddy?” while her father tried to quiet her down. Percy happened to get off at the same stop as them. Her delighted shrieks preceded them up the stairs and back into the open air where she could see that, indeed, the snow had fallen several blocks up from where they started. Percy watched them head off, a dull mixture of jealousy and nostalgia pinging in his subconscious like a notification on his phone.

Of all the places he should wind up on the tail end of a dream, this chilled him the most. He found his destination after backtracking along the Hudson for a few blocks, and his toes had all but frozen in his oxfords by the time the turret came into view. He had seen the church once before while looking for a certain mausoleum. Percy stopped across the street to apprise the stonework on the face of the building. Little ploughs of snow had settled in the circular sills of the stained glass windows and on top of the arched overhang. 

Once he had begun to shiver, Percy crossed the street and stepped into the foyer of the church, where the warm air hung heavy with a century of stale incense. He shuffled his feet on the rug to shake off the snow. Peeking through an archway into the main chapel, he saw a handful of people following a tour guide around by the altar. One had a camera and was snapping pictures of the glass mosaic pressed into the apse. The rest had their arms crossed behind their backs, or skimmed their fingers over the pews as the group made its way down the central passage. A couple in the back held hands, their heads bent together in a whispered conversation. 

Besides the tour, a few others sat quietly on their own. An old man in a white robe looked up from lighting candles to see Percy lurking there, just outside the threshold of the main space. Percy gestured off to the left, where he knew the library waited, and the man nodded.

The only other two people in the library ignored him when he entered. One was a college-age student typing vigorously on her laptop, headphones and hood pulled up over her head. Across the room, a man in a dark uniform was reading scripture at a table. The space had a calm, still feel about it. Percy busied himself for several hours among the dozens of stacks, taking notes and keeping a list of the books that he reviewed. 

Around noon, he heard a cough from the doorway and glanced over, expecting to see one of the clerical aids rolling in a cart of books. He started at the sight of Kima grasping a brown paper bag in one fist. She had her same puffy coat on over her gym clothes. The only difference from her normal appearance was the blackening red and brown smudge beneath her swollen eye. The ice had done her a favor—he cringed to think how it would have looked without it. 

“Vibe check,” she called out.

The cover of the book Percy been reading fell closed as he sat back in his seat. “Pardon?”

“Never mind, you ruined it.”

“How did you know where to find me?” he asked, once she reached his table.

“I used my scrying eye.” Kima waved her phone at him. “I set our phones to share each other’s location.”

“Clever,” he said, taken aback, “and invasive. But not a terrible idea, honestly...”

“Thanks. You hungry? I just got out of a session with this one client who wouldn’t stop talking about lunch, and now I’m starving...”

The crinkling of the stiff paper as she began to dig around in the bag drew looks from the other two people studying in the room. 

“Let’s...” Percy gathered up his things in a rush, tucking his notebook under his arm. “There’s a meeting room downstairs. Shall we eat in there?”

“Uhh...”

Kima was halfway done pulling her lunch out. She dropped it back to the bottom of the bag, disappointed. She followed Percy out the door and down the hall, away from the prayer area, down a short flight of stairs, and into an open space lined with folding tables. It was a large room, yellow-lit and empty. The generic church basement smell greeted them on arrival.

“That’s more like it,” said Kima, dropping into the nearest metal chair, already fishing her food back out. “I didn’t want those guys staring at us anyway. Hey,” she added with her mouth full, “weren’t you going to meet up with the witch burning guy and talk about magic?”

“I was going to, but I decided to come here instead.”

Percy caught the tinfoil-wrapped blob that she slid across to him before it could fall off the end of the table. The foil peeled away to reveal a flattened piece of bread rolled up to hold an assortment of meat, vegetables, and sauce. The spices hit him on the first bite—not spicy, but packed with unfamiliar flavors. 

“It’s a gyro,” said Kima, looking pleased at his reaction. “Did you come here because it looks like your castle?”

Percy almost choked. “This church has the best selection of books on the occult,” he said noncommittally. “Aside from, of course, an actual cult.”

“Cults, huh?”

As they ate, he told her about how decades back in the church’s history, they’d had a scare involving a parishioner who had convinced other members that he was channeling messages from beyond the grave. Somehow there was money involved in it (there was always money involved in it, on this plane). The pastors amassed their collection of books while covertly researching how to disrupt the rising faction without the leader killing half of them. Kima poked through one of the books while he spoke, skimming over the words on the pages as she chewed. A bit of the yogurt sauce dripped down on the table. She didn’t seem to notice, and he couldn’t tell whether she was listening or reading, or neither.

“So do you think any of that cult stuff has to do with our problem?” she said, in the middle of his description of mass suicides.

“I don’t know.” There was something about that dream that kept returning to his head. The vividness of it. The location. The warning in Vex’s severe expression. _Don’t you dare give up on me_. “Maybe.”

He didn’t offer anything beyond that.

“Well,” sighed Kima, “Sounds like no answers as usual. At least the food around here is pretty good, right?”

Percy considered her for a moment. “You know what, Kima?”

“What?”

“I always thought that the days of being tortured by the Briarwoods and watching my family shot full of arrows were the very worst days of my life,” Percy said mildly. “Now here I am, wondering how my family is doing without me—assuming they haven’t also been ripped to some other plane of existence. Or that I’ve been erased from their memories. Or that they’ve been wiped off the face of our home plane because I simply ceased to exist. And every day I spend here, not being able to answer even the most basic questions about _why_ , is the very worst day of my life. However—” Placing his food down in exchange for a napkin, Percy dabbed at the corners of his mouth. “Setting aside all of that… yes, the food on this plane is delicious.”

Kima stared at him, blank-faced, until her stoniness gave way to a wry grin.

“You’re such an ass,” she laughed under her breath. “And you’re wrong about all of that other stuff. I _know_ our families are still there.”

“What makes you think so?”

Setting aside all those piled-up fears, Percy believed it too. He was damn sure of it, doubled down against every doubt that had ever crossed his mind. But he’d never said it with such conviction as Kima did now.

“Allie was in my dream last night.”

He blinked. “Is that unusual?”

“No, but this was different. She was _in_ my dream. She really saw me.”

A strange prickling feeling had crept under Percy’s collar. The sounds of the street outside seemed to grow dull. The smells of savory food and the mildewy basement faded away. 

“What did you see?”

Percy leaned in to listen, and Kima, seeing his shoulders stiffen, leaned in to tell him.

“We were at your wedding. At the rehearsal dinner, out on the beach. It was just the two of us, with all the empty chairs.” Kima waved her hands around her sides, as if the chairs were set up here in the church, and she could see them. “We had that wine. You know?”

Percy nodded, slowly. He remembered tilting back his head and swallowing it down—a lovely red wine, expensive and well-balanced in flavor—and meeting Vex’s eyes, and the slow, dawning realization as they both began to sway…

“Allie was holding a glass of it. She looked right at me, and then she just started to drink it. I tried to talk to her but I couldn’t... and when I went to drink mine, the glass was empty...” Kima trailed off, like she didn’t remember the rest, or didn’t know what to make of what she said. “And now I find you here, reading about cultists.”

Percy stood. “Let’s get some air.”

He led her up the stairs and down a narrow, red-carpeted corridor into the back of the church. Glancing about to see whether anyone would see, Percy opened a heavy wood door at the end of the hallway and ushered Kima inside. Up the stairs they went, in the semi-dark, a countless row of spirals up the central tower. He was all but huffing when they finally reached the top. 

Kima didn't even pause to catch her breath. She closed the door and did a slow turn to take in the view, her fists perched on her hips. “Wow,” she said, “we’re definitely not supposed to be up here, are we?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised at the places they let you go if you show even the slightest amount of sincerity... but probably not without an escort.”

They were standing at the top of the church tower, which happened to be one of the highest points on all of Manhattan Island. In the beginning, he had come here often to read his notes and think. The first time he’d gotten access to the top had been because he managed to convince one of the acolytes to take him up. All the other times, he’d stolen his way there. Whether the people who ran the church knew about it, he couldn’t say. 

Percy crossed over to where Kima had climbed up on a ledge of stone to get a better look over the wall. She had her phone out.

“Why do the people on this plane always need to take pictures?” said Percy.

“So we can look at them later and remember all the fun we had,” she said, focusing on the view through her screen. She turned the lens on Percy. “And sometimes to make money. Smile!”

“Are you such a good photographer?” he said, ignoring her request.

“No. But I get—Katie used to get money from companies for wearing certain fitness clothes or drinking certain protein shakes if I posted about them online. And actually, dudes have offered to pay a lot of money for pics of my ears.”

“What, why?”

“You don’t wanna know, Percy.” 

Seeming to come back to herself, Kima slipped the phone back into her pocket and zipped it up. “It’s a big city from up here, isn’t it?”

“You think so? I always thought it looked smaller this way…”

The wind up here was sharp, but the air was clear. Beyond them, the endless rows of buildings gave way to infinite blue sky. The sight beyond the tower never disappointed—at least not intrinsically. Planes and helicopters flew close and far, an ever-present highway in the sky, floating with engineering ingenuity that could have passed for magic. As always, he reeled in his curiosity about them and tucked it away, out of sight.

 _This is it_ , Percy thought, looking out over the skyline. He had thought it a hundred times before: this is when the epiphany happens. He had the entire city before him. If he opened his arms wide enough, he could fit it between his palms. Somewhere in here was the answer. 

Kima had folded her arms atop the wall and rested her chin on them. “Have you ever left the city since you woke up?”

“No.”

Kima lightly touched her fingertips to the bruise beneath her eye. “Why not?”

“Well,” Percy said heavily, “because I know in my heart that the solution is here somewhere. And…” He sighed. “Because I’m afraid that if I leave, something will happen to stop me from coming back. Or I’ll miss the key to get me home. I know it’s irrational—” he added, nodding down to Kima, “but I keep telling myself that I haven’t had a good enough reason to try it.”

Percy turned back to the boundless stretch of streets and skyscrapers and the mingling steam from thousands of boiler vents. 

“I dreamed last night as well,” he said.

Percy told her everything, not taking his eyes off the distant sprawl in case he should see a clue. They stood there watching, collars pulled up around their necks to keep the wind from sneaking down their shirts. Before them, the city moved with life and the endless hustle. Behind, ships flowed up and down the Hudson, leaving dark trails with their wake like snails. The answer didn’t come then.

It didn’t come for almost two weeks, in fact. And when it did, it took the form of a stack of paper—which was something like vindication, all things considered.

Kima slammed the white shipping envelope on the kitchen table with a force that sloshed tea over the side of Percy’s mug.

“Look what finally showed up!”

“What is it?” Percy said, irritated and rushing to mop up the spill before it could reach his stack of notebooks.

The stack was Kima’s medical records from the hospital where she had recovered after her car crash. 

They wasted no time in diving headlong into them, including Kima, who had to cancel her appointments for the afternoon and find coverage for her classes in order to stay home. Out of the corner of his eye, Percy watched as she engaged in full texting conversations while pacing across the small living room, making calls to ask whether other instructors could help her out.

“Okay, that’s done,” she announced after she’d hung up her last phone call and pulled up one of the rickety wooden chairs to the table. “You figure it out yet?”

“No, I haven’t solved our months-long problem in the ten—” Percy checked his watch, “twelve minutes you’ve been on the phone. But here’s what we’ll do...”

On the first run-through, they tried to get a sense of what her treatment had been, and the timeline that it had taken. The first major hint revealed itself the moment that Percy flipped to the summary report, and a eerie, warm feeling flooded his body. He had to straighten his glasses and peer down a second time, then consult one of his notebooks, just to make sure he was right.

“Look at this,” he said, sliding the first page across to her and circling the line with his pen, trying to hold the excitement back from his voice.

“The date of my accident.” She had the page held up in front of her face. “What about it?”

Now he set his notebook in front of her. On the top of the page, a note from several months ago said the date that someone had run Frederick over while he was crossing the street. Kima read it once, looked back to the page from her pile, went back to the notebook again, and then looked up at Percy.

“Same date,” said Kima.

“Same date,” said Percy.

“Oh, man,” she said, sounding both excited and, if Percy heard correctly, a bit nervous.

“There’s got to be more in here. You make a timeline. I’ll start on the list of names…”

They spent the first two hours just learning the basic story. Kima had never bothered to review her medical records in the past, and before Percy came along, she had no reason to. The injury, her recovery, and her lingering side effects were all textbook ordinary. Nothing in them suggested a time where she reported being someone else. Compared to Percy’s record—in which he had thrashed, hollered himself hoarse, and insisted that he was from a distant magical realm—her story was downright boring.

“I can’t believe I didn’t punch a single person,” she said after her second read-through.

“Why the disbelief? Don’t you remember all of this treatment?”

“Most of it. But still! How many did _you_ hit?”

Percy put his pencil down and flexed his fingers open and shut. Whatever tendon or muscle he had damaged had a tendency to cramp after writing for too long, and he’d been inscribing notes nonstop since they started.

“Two,” he said thoughtfully, massaging the back of his hand. “I think hospital policy about these things is that the first punch is a freebie. After the second, they give you a nice pharmaceutical cocktail and send you to a quiet place. Shall we run through the names?”

“Let’s do it.”

Percy began to go through a list of medical providers that he had culled from his much denser volume of records. After each name, Kima scanned through her own list and marked off whether they had a match. Towards the end, he read off the name “Trevor Smith.”

Kima sighed, rubbing her neck while she trailed an index finger down the column of her paper. “Trevor Smith, Trevor Smith… I don’t think—wait, yes! Trevor Smith!”

“Could be a coincidence,” Percy said, ever guarded against disappointment. “Let’s just finish cross-referencing.”

But no other names came up. Kima pulled out her phone and began to search for him.

“It’s such a generic name,” she said under her breath, focused on the screen. “Maybe if I put the hospitals by name, or just the city maybe? …Okay, the hospital posted an article a couple months ago about some fundraiser where he’s named… there’s a group picture, but how do we tell which one is—oh, shit!” she gasped.

There was a loud _clunk_ as her phone fell from her hand and hit the table. Percy jumped up as Kima slammed backward in her chair, almost knocking it over, her head in her hands. 

“Kima—?”

Rushing around to her side of the table and dropping to his knees beside her, Percy gripped the outer frame of the chair and leaned in close to study her face. She was grimacing, jaw clenched as if she were in pain. Gingerly, he picked up the phone where it had fallen and examined the screen. He half expected a curse to fly out and hit him in the face—he kind of hoped that it did, just to disprove his theory about magic on this plane—but there was just the picture.

“I… I know him,” Kima said through her fingers. “The memory just hit me.”

“Which one is he?” said Percy.

“Back row. Far left.”

He found him. The man was tall and pale, with short black hair. He stood along with the dozen others in the photograph, donned blue scrubs with his hands tucked neatly behind his back. Percy recognized him, of course. Back when he’d just gotten started on his investigation, he’d tracked down every person mentioned in the records. Some he’d questioned directly. Others, like Trevor, he had stalked for a day or two, then either confronted or decided that there was nothing to see. 

This fellow he remembered well enough—Trevor wasn’t working at the hospital anymore by the time Percy found him; he spent most of his time smoking and drinking at a bar near his apartment. But nothing about him struck Percy as remarkable or even interesting, which made Kima’s reaction all the stranger. She was still breathing heavily, bent over double, but after a few more seconds she sat upright again.

“He was in the hospital,” she breathed. “Right after the accident. He spoke to me.”

Kima was looking just past him where he knelt on the kitchen floor, her eyes peering through the tile and deep into her memory. Her hand slowly came up and covered her mouth, her expression thoughtful, tinged with fear. “He was standing over me, and he said…”

Percy waited, frozen, afraid that if he moved the recall would slide back out of her head. Finally, the focus came back to Kima’s face. She turned and locked eyes with him.

“He said, ‘fiction is a window.’”


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

The bulb in the entryway lamp had died, so his apartment was dark when he opened the door. He spent several seconds cursing and fumbling with the lamp before he remembered. Dropping his bag on the carpet, he began to feel his way across to the kitchen and the switch on the wall. His only visual guide was the ambient light from the window overlooking the alley where the landlord kept the dumpsters. 

He had spent the better part of his night at the bar, and with his inebriated focus on not breaking his neck tripping over anything, he failed to notice that the apartment was significantly colder than it should have been. Had he not been in such a hurry, he might also have noticed the curtains gently moving against the frame of the open window. But it wasn’t until a sound began to emanate throughout the apartment that he noticed anything at all. 

The synths and drum picked up first, and the gentle voice began to sing:

_get up get up get up get up... wake up wake up wake up wake up..._

_oh baby, let’s get down tonight_

He froze mid-step, arm extended toward the light switch, to find someone already standing there. 

“Hello, Trevor,” said Percy.

Trevor didn’t have time to react. As the yellowed kitchen light flared up overhead, Percy’s hands closed around his throat and pushed him backwards into the living room. Trevor stumbled, barely able to keep on his feet. When his calves bumped up against the couch, he collapsed onto it, choking at the pressure on his windpipe.

Percy reached one hand back to tug something out from under his coat. He flashed the barrel of the handgun. 

“Let’s not disturb the neighbors, Trevor.”

Already blue in the face, Trevor nodded. He gasped as the grip released and the air began to flow. In the background, the music had danced into the first chorus of _Sexual Healing_ , loud enough to mask their voices, but not so loud as to draw the neighbors’ attention in the middle of the night.

“It’s so good to finally meet you,” Percy said.

He moved an ashtray out of his way and found a seat on the coffee table across from where Trevor half sat, half lay on the couch. With his posture tilted forward, Percy could have been mistaken for an old friend eager to catch up after a long time away—except for the firearm held loosely between his hands. 

Percy took his time inspecting Trevor’s pale, dumbfounded face. For someone who had caused so much commotion, he had a plain look about him. Neither handsome nor ugly, with short brown hair and eyes a color between grey and green. He seemed the perfect sort to blend in anywhere.

“You look a little surprised to see me here. Or perhaps it’s the music selection? I’m well aware at this point that Marvin Gaye has far better songs than this.” Percy waved the gun off toward the speaker. “But there’s something about it that’s just nostalgic. It brings me back to sitting on the subway, learning about how to use an iPod—an iPod! Can you imagine? Back then, I was still wondering whether I had died, and this was just my own special sliver of Hell... Then I learned about you.”

“How did you find me?” Trevor wheezed, still rubbing his throat. 

“That’s an excellent question,” Percy said. “I have some questions myself. So let me start with what I hope, for your sake, is the easiest one: where is my family?”

Trevor hesitated, visibly processing the words in the laborious way of a drunk man. “Not here.”

“Where?”

“Home. Back on the material plane.”

“So why am _I_ here?”

“It was…uh…" He trailed off.

Trevor could plainly sense the violence looming just past Percy’s calm exterior. Even Percy could hear the cold threat in his own voice when he spoke. His heart was railing away, and he had to fight the urge to do the same when Trevor cleared his throat.

Percy leaned a little closer and said, softly, “I asked you a question.”

He watched as Trevor had a brief internal struggle; in his drunken state, the thoughts were apparent. He eyed Percy, then the gun, then the door, then the gun. Then he looked away and said, “We had to know whether we could decide—not _decide_ , but—choose what happened when—when someone—passed through the gate.”

“The gate to this plane?”

“Yeah. It’s, like, a portal we made to move back and forth between here and there. But this plane is… it’s resistant to magic. So when people come through, reality sort of… bends to make them fit.”

“And by ‘we’ you mean, of course, the Whispered One’s faithful.” No answer. “Where is the gate?”

Again, no answer. Trevor’s eyes darted in obvious search for an escape from the conversation. He chanced a look over his shoulder to the window just behind him, where the fire escape platform stood waiting. His arm rose as if to push himself up, but Percy seized him by the shoulder and stopped him. When Trevor relented, so did Percy.

“Now, now, Trevor,” Percy said. “As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we’re well beyond the influence of gods here. Even yours. So in the event that you should perish on _this_ plane and, say, your body thrown into the East River, your existence would… well, I suppose it would just end, wouldn’t it?”

Suddenly Percy pitched forward from the coffee table and lunged toward Trevor, who had nowhere to go except deeper into the cushions. Kneeling on the couch, Percy grabbed Trevor by the collar of his jacket and pinned him down. He felt a tranquility come over him when he pressed the muzzle up under Trevor’s chin. The other man gave a strangled yelping sound, distorted by the pressure pushing his jaw closed. Up close, the strong smell of alcohol and cigarettes was almost cough-inducing.

“I have to tell you, it’s been some time since I killed anyone,” Percy said, in a low, almost wistful voice. “I’d thought these past few years had made me a little soft. But I just have this _itch_. More of a curiosity, really.”

He grabbed a fistful of Trevor’s hair and yanked his head back just long enough to show him the side of the gun.

“This is such a neat little instrument, isn’t it? Much more sleek than what I’m used to. I can’t help wondering: how would it feel to scrape this barrel across the roof of your mouth? Do you think I’d actually be able to feel the ridges of your palate, or would the rattling of your teeth be too much of a distraction?”

He finally got the response he’d been fishing for. All it took was moving the gun to Trevor’s tightly-pressed mouth. The moment Percy used it to nudge Trevor’s lip down, revealing the row of yellowed teeth, something seemed to register. Trevor began to writhe beneath him—not fighting, but squirming, flopping helplessly like a carp caught in a net.

“Please don’t—please!” he sobbed, voice cracking. “I can’t die here, please…”

“Who else is here?”

“Who—?”

“From our plane,” Percy said, exasperated. “How many unwitting people did you toss through the portal?”

“Just two,” Trevor stammered. “You and—the halfling woman.”

“What halfling?”

“The—your friend—she’s, I don’t remember her name—from the Platinum Sanctuary.”

“Lady Kima?” Percy said, feigning surprise.

“Yes!” Trevor said in excitement, apparently oblivious. “She’s here.”

“Where?”

“In the City, down on the southwest side. She has an apartment.”

“Then I suppose you know my next question.” When Trevor just stared, stunned as ever, Percy sighed and said, “ _Why?_ Why are we here?”

“I—already said! We had to know… to test the rituals. We knew that if you came over, the plane would put you in someone else’s place. And we had to know if we could control whether or not you kept your own memories.”

“But _you_ were already here,” Percy said, tapping the gun against Trevor’s jaw to emphasize his point. “And you seem to have all your brains in the right place. For now. So what was there to test?”

“It was on accident—me coming through. They’d been messing with the gate to try t-to get through the magic barrier. We got it so that we could _see_ through it, and hear things, but they couldn’t, like, pass into this plane. And I was… well, I was there when the casters were doing a—like messing with their spell, and something happened.”

“You got sucked in,” said Percy.

“Yeah, me and two others.”

“I think I know where this is going. But please, do tell.”

Percy drew his arm back, just enough to give Trevor the room to sit up. He still had nowhere to go with the gun trained his face, but he propped himself upright against the couch so he wasn’t lying prone. He ran a hand through his hair where Percy had grabbed it, flattening it back down in a nervous gesture without seeming to notice he was doing it.

“One came back as a guy who fell off the scaffolding on a construction project and hit his head. But I became just some guy who had a skiing accident. I woke up, and I had all my memories still. And everyone knew me, but I wasn’t me. I was Trevor.”

“Where’s the other fellow now?”

“Dead,” Trevor croaked. “He got run over by a taxi before he had time to learn to look both ways…”

Percy almost laughed, but he didn’t. “What about the third?”

“I had to find him. It took ages. And when I did, he looked like himself but he was someone else. He thought he was the person who he took over for.”

“That's quite the dilemma,” Percy said. “You find this portal, you send people through it, but you don’t know what will happen to them on the other side. They might emerge as themselves, or become someone else entirely. So you make some modifications to the ritual, and run some more tests at our expense. Which, I take it, were successful?”

Trevor nodded. “You kept your memories. She didn’t.”

There was room for a snide remark here—essentially an endless number of snide remarks—but Percy remembered his past encounters with the Remnants. Once they stopped talking, they stopped for good. “And what happened when you go back across the gate? Do you just materialize as you were before?”

“I haven’t been back,” Trevor said. “No one has.”

“Then how do you know about all this arcane experimentation that’s been happening on the other side?”

“They told me. We can talk through the portal, if you’re close enough. T-that’s how I knew you’d be coming.”

“But you can’t just walk back through?”

“Not yet,” said Trevor. “But they’re working on it…they’ll know…”

A silence fell over the apartment, except for the sound of the singer pining _baby please don’t go_ to the quiet storm saxophone, and the ethereal omni-presence of the city through the window. The sheer curtains fluttered as an errant gust brushed over them. Percy watched it toss Trevor’s hair off his forehead, leaving strands where his sweat had glued them down. 

“All of this…” Percy said, drawing back to his seat on the coffee table. “Why?”

At this point, he knew. But he needed to hear the confirmation. Trevor’s hands quivered visibly as he straightened his jacket.

“I’m no sorcerer,” Trevor began in a near-whisper. “I was just a stable-hand living in Kymal, shoveling horseshit. Then I found _them_ , and I learned… everything… I never knew there were so many planes. There’s trillions and trillions and trillions. So many that if you search through enough, you can find one with people who you thought you lost.” 

Trevor had been avoiding Percy’s eyes. But at that moment, whether from alcohol or indoctrination, he seemed to find his courage. 

“It’s not over,” he said. “The Whispered One will rise again. We have what we need here.”

“A leader,” said Percy. “Delilah.”

A slow, keen smile cracked over Trevor’s face. In that instant, he looked nothing like the photograph from the website—not the cheery, smiling person whose life he’d taken over when he crossed the portal. He was an insider, a member, a follower. And he believed.

“When she crosses the gate, she will return to her power to lead us back to greatness. And she won’t be alone—she’ll have us, and an army of a million. The dead will follow us through, and together, we will raise the Him to his rightful place. Even if it means we have to start Exandria from scratch.”

“When?”

Percy said it as a demand, not a question. Now that the shock of his presence had worn off, and Trevor had remembered his ‘great purpose,’ the time of cooperation was limited. Trevor hadn’t seemed to hear him. He was staring off, the half-cocked smile not quite worn from his face. It faded entirely as Percy stood.

“When,” he said again.

“Soon.” Trevor licked his lips. “The lines between the planes are getting thin, and the gate’s ready on our side. We’re just waiting now.”

Percy allowed himself a moment to think at Trevor’s expense. He’d come here with a list of questions in his mind. Some he had more or less guess beforehand, and just needed confirmation. Others lingered.

“Lady Kima and I…” he began. “We were just a passive side-effect of your experiment, then? Why run the risk of bringing Vox Machina down on your whole operation—”

“—they couldn’t _find_ the operation. It’s too well covered—”

“—unless… you ultimately planned for us to wind up here anyway.”

It would certainly be easier to burn down the whole of Exandria without Vox Machina and their allies on the plane to stop them.

“Some of you, yes. The others… will have different uses. We’ve had more than five years to perfect the plan.”

Silas Briarwood’s voice rang out from the depths of Percy’s memory. Silas, on the edge of a cliff, standing over where he and Vex knelt in shackles: _“I bring judgment to you both, the first of many vengeances to be brought down upon your loved ones.”_ They had destroyed him, but not before he’d made his intentions clear. The cult survived. And so too, apparently, had his wishes.

“You can’t stop it,” Trevor said, torn between excitement and apprehension. “It was always meant to be. It’s greater than any one of us.”

Trevor’s head tipped back, and Percy saw the face of a stable-hand. The wide, round eyes were glassy in the faint window light. He had the classic look of the cultist—the fervent, the hopeful, the not-quite-informed. So eager to throw away his human life for a chance at an afterlife in the good graces of a necromancer. Percy pitied him, but just for a moment. Then he raised his arm, and squared the gun between Trevor’s eyebrows.

“Wait—!” The plaintiveness left Trevor immediately, but as he began to rise, Percy pressed the gun to his forehead and he froze again.

“I’ve had some ugly thoughts, here on this plane. I’d love to think you put them there. But I just don’t think you’re smart enough.”

“Thoughts—?”

“You should have killed me, Trevor,” said Percy.

“But I didn’t!”

“You weren’t kind. You were _lazy_.”

Percy bit down on that last word, harsh enough to make Trevor cringe.

“You let the world deal with me so you wouldn’t have to. You knew they’d lock me up like a madman, or turn me loose to a place where I had nothing. If the city didn’t kill me, my own mind would do the job. Isn’t that right?”

With the tip of a gun pressing an indentation into his forehead, Trevor could do nothing, except utter in an imploring whisper, “I let you keep your life.”

“It wasn’t yours to take,” Percy replied. “You’ll be happy to know that I suffered. But unfortunately for you, my life no longer resides in my body. I split it into five, and left it back in Whitestone. I won’t die apart from them.”

Percy drew the pistol’s hammer back with his thumb. At the sound of the click, Trevor’s whole body began to shake. 

“Please don’t kill me here,” Trevor pled, all but weeping. “Kill me if you want, but not here. Let me go to the gate. Please, I’ll show you the way!”

“I’ll admit it. I _do_ want to kill you. But there’s good news, Trevor—”

Percy pulled the trigger. Trevor winced, his body tensed, frozen mid-way in his last, sharp intake of breath. Only after several long seconds did he seem to realize that he was still alive, and that a bullet had not lodged into his brain. His eyes opened to see Percy still standing there. 

“I’m retired,” said Percy. Lowering the gun to his side, he sat back down on the edge of the coffee table. He pressed his palms against his knees and arched his back, uttering a soft sigh as he stretched. When he had cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders, he smiled back at Trevor, who just sat there, looking as if Percy had clocked him in the head. “As for the bad news: she’s not.”

A pair of arms appeared through the window. Before Trevor had time to gasp, or even see it coming, one hand had clapped down over his mouth while the other wrapped around his neck. With one heavy yank, Kima heaved Trevor off the couch, his legs kicking, backwards through the window and onto the fire escape. Then she pivoted, swung him around, and dumped him over the edge.

Percy had always found the city noise to be borderline torturous, but it did have one thing going for it: with all the clamor and the chaos, Trevor’s head hitting the bottom of the dumpster hardly made a sound.

Kima vaulted through the window and over the couch, landing neatly on her feet. Percy leaned out to see the still body sprawled five stories below. Blood had already begun to pool around the head like a dark halo.

“I was speaking metaphorically when I said to crack his skull,” said Percy.

“What can I say?” Kima said smugly. “It’s been a while since I squashed some baddies. Not really my style, maybe, but it’s not like I have the Holy Avenger on by back…”

“Yes, well, let’s hope no one looks too close when they throw out their trash bags tomorrow.” He pointed over toward the speakers. “I’ll cover up your murder if you grab my iPod. Did you already pack up the books? And give his desk one more look-through—”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it. And for the record, it’s not a murder if it’s a cultist worshiping a lich king.”

“Tell that to the NYPD.”

Glancing around, Percy grabbed the ashtray from the coffee table and a chair from the kitchen. He put the chair out on the fire escape, and the ashtray on top of it. It only took a few seconds of rummaging to find a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. 

A man falls off a fire escape while trying to have a smoke—it couldn’t be _that_ uncommon in a city this large, could it? Although, Percy thought to himself with a touch of irony, it would look awfully sad if it appeared he never even got one puff.

Percy took one cigarette from the box before dumping the rest onto the grated fire escape and throwing the box down after it. Several of the little white cylinders slipped through the grated platform and spiraled down to the dumpster. The last one, he popped into his mouth just as Kima made it back to the window. The music had stopped, and she had a tense look about her.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. “Can we get out of here?”

“Mhmm, just putting the final touches… these things require finesse...”

Cupping one hand around the end of the cigarette to block the wind, Percy lit it with Trevor’s lighter. He took a long drag to help it catch. The unfamiliar burn in his throat and lungs made him itch to cough, but he fought it. Smoke curled up and dissipated into the darkness as he let it out in a slow exhale. A sort of pleasant buzz folded into his head, and as Percy breathed in the cold night air, he felt his shoulders ease even though he hadn’t known they’d been tense.

“Well that’s interesting.”

Kima had already started down the ladder, too impatient to wait. Percy took one last pull and tossed the lit cigarette and the lighter over the edge to join their owner. The amber end of the cigarette dwindled and disappeared from view as it fell.

A few blocks later, Percy sat in the passenger seat of Kima’s car, inspecting the handle of the handgun while she lugged the backpack full of notes into the trunk. Kima had showed up with the gun that afternoon, when they’d decided tonight was the night to follow Trevor home from his ritualistic excursion to the bar. He’d only just taken out the empty magazine and figured out how to load the ammunition by hand. 

“What d’you think of that, by the way?” Kima said when she saw him. Her bizarre anger had dissipated by now, so he decided not to pursue it.

“It’s just so… functional,” he said, glancing over the bland black barrel. 

“Don’t sound so disappointed, Percy. It’s not a fucking art project.”

"Clearly not," he said.

Percy slid the magazine back into the handle and tucked the gun into the front of his jacket. He had Michael’s leather on tonight—the double-breasted wool coat didn’t serve so well for sneaking around at three in the morning. Or for tackling drunken cultists.

“Function is what we need right now,” said Kima. She put the car in gear and sped out under the matchstick glow of the street lights. “Not that you even used it.”

“I’m honestly not sure that I could.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he began, “I doubt Frederick ever held a gun before, much less fired one.”

He still had one of the bullets in his hand. He held it up to the window to get a better look at its shape—more sleek than anything he’d made, but so utilitarian.

“So what? You’re not Frederick.”

“Well you’re not Katie, but you know jujitsu because Katie knew jujitsu.” At Kima’s doubtful silence, he said, “It was just a thought. Probably nothing. I wanted to test it out that day, when I was talking to your friend Randy. Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember… but forget about him,” she said. “What do you think about what Trevor said? About the planes getting closer, or something like that? It was hard to hear from outside.”

“I expect he meant the winter solstice. It’s less than a month from now.”

Kima sighed. “Maybe we shouldn’t have offed him. He didn’t say how they summoned us for their ritual. Or where to find the portal.”

In the corner of his periphery, Percy saw Kima glance away from the street to steal a look at him. He had deliberately turned his head toward the passenger window, though, watching the street signs roll by without seeing them. The bullet in his hand felt warm and heavy from rolling over and over in his fingers. The kick from the cigarette had begun to wear off, now. It had left an acrid taste on his tongue.

“He didn’t need to,” Percy muttered. “I know where it is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *John Mulaney voice* now we don't have time to unpack ALL of that...
> 
> You probably did not notice that I added an extra chapter to the total. This was part of a longer chapter that I really, REALLY didn't want to break up for pacing reasons, but this scene is almost 4000 words on its own, which would have made the chapter like 9000 words lmao. Which... is something that may or may not happen in the future (read: it will), but it didn't end up being necessary here.
> 
> Thanks for reading! RIP Trevor


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time to see what Percy and Kima have been up to since they murdered the shit out of Trevor...

Chapter 9

By far, the best part of Katie’s classes was the end. When at last the buzzer sounded and she bellowed for the group to put down their free weights, half the class just dropped to the ground with grateful groans. Percy was in the other dozen or so who could at least keep on his feet long enough for some water—a major improvement, given that just a few weeks ago, he’d walked out of class after ten minutes to go throw up in the locker room. Still, his legs shook precariously as he carried his weights back to the rack and wiped them down. 

Drying his face on his shirt, Percy took a long drink of water and gladly returned to his place on the floor. Around him, some of the other participants were chatting as they sipped their water bottles and settled leisurely onto their mats. The room went quiet once Katie turned down the overhead lights.

“Good work, kids. Let’s take it down.”

Percy rolled onto his back and reached his arms up over his head, savoring the tremor that ran through him. Katie told them what to stretch, how long to hold it there, when to switch to the other side. He only half-listened as he followed along. With his head full of plans for the coming days, he didn’t have room for much else. Nevertheless, he found some peace in the exhaustion that began to take hold as his muscles cooled down. 

At the end of the stretching, Katie directed the group to lie still, and focus on their breath.

“Picture a bright light just above the eyes… with every inhale, it grows brighter. Let it fill the space behind your forehead until all you see is white… and hold it there…”

Percy could see it, a little bit. Something always caught his attention and drew it away from the meditation, but he tried to draw his consciousness to the breath. He could feel the reverberation of his heartbeat through his body as it slowed down to a normal pace. His mind settled into that liminal consciousness. And there, waiting for him at the bottom, was the island. A tiny mound of land just off the coast of the Bronx, one mile long and a third of a mile wide. At different points in history it had been a home, a military base, a prison, a hospital, a workhouse, and above all, a cemetery. A final resting place for the unclaimed, the disclaimed, the poor, and the stillborn. One million dead, by some accounts. The very place that Doctor Hernandez had said he was lucky to avoid.

“ _Nobody found you until almost noon. If it was January, you’d have frozen to death overnight and you’d be on your way to Hart Island_.”

As he'd learned, this was not, strictly speaking, accurate. Had he actually frozen to death after his run-in with the robbers, his corpse would have sat at the coroner’s office for several days, until inevitably no one claimed him. Then off it would have gone, by boat, stacked up with the other anonymous dead of the city, north to the island to be buried in a trench.

An army of a million undead, Trevor had said. Clearly, no one had told him that half of the buried were under the age of five. But even half a million would do well as the beginnings of a new army. And with Delilah at the head of the pack—

“Um, excuse me…”

Someone was touching him. Percy came-to, still sprawled out on his mat. A woman with dark blonde hair pulled into a bun was shaking him gently. Her fingertips felt cool on his bicep.

“Huh—?”

“Sorry,” she said, in an apologetic whisper. “The class is over.”

The woman squatting in front of him had been to his left the entire class. Around him, people were climbing to their feet and rolling up their mats. The room was still dark, with quiet music playing out from speakers in the ceiling. 

“Right!” Percy lifted himself up onto an elbow. “I hope I wasn’t snoring.”

“No, not at all,” said the woman, laughing a little as she drew her hand away.

“Well, thank you anyway,” he said, offering a smile. “You saved me from the embarrassment of Katie finding me asleep. You might have even saved a rib or two.”

She smiled back at him. “Maybe so.” Her eyes passed over his face again, a little too long, which he pretended not to notice. “See you on Thursday?”

“If I make it that far.”

With one last flitting smirk, the woman stood upright, grabbed her mat, and was gone. Kima found him after the last few stragglers had filed out of the room.

“How you feeling, strong guy? I saw you upped your weights again today,” she said, whacking him on the back with such force that he almost fell over on his wobbly legs. His mumbled response made her laugh. “Let’s grab some coffee, and then there’s something I want to show you…”

On Percy’s first two visits to the gym, when he’d gone to watch her fight, he’d gotten a false sense of what the place was like. The area where Katie had her matches with Joe looked like a makeshift boxing ring in an old car garage. In the front part of the building, however, someone had taken great care to hide the old building’s former life. The gym where Katie worked had glass walls everywhere, flat-screen televisions in the lobby, and two stories of different exercise stations. The floors were made of some kind of springy material, and were constantly under the attendance of college-age employees wielding rags and cleaning spray. Percy could have licked the floors and all he’d taste was bleach. Out in the lobby, the gym had a store to buy over-priced fitness apparel, where he suspected Kima had bought the clothes he was wearing. 

The gym also had a café. A few other patrons of Katie’s class were hanging out there, drinking green shakes through paper straws and nibbling on protein bars. She gave them friendly nods as Percy trailed behind her to the counter, where their drinks already waited for them. Here, even the baristas looked like part-time bodybuilders. The woman behind the counter had her uniform sleeves rolled up to the shoulder, presumably to show off the well-cut muscles of her arms.

“Two triple-shot espressos for the H-B-I-C,” she called out as Kima approached.

“Thanks, Maeve.”

Kima passed one of the two white travel cups to Percy, who was in the midst of wondering what his wife would think if she knew he was sipping velvety smooth coffee in black joggers and a fitted muscle shirt, with a rolled-up yoga mat slung over one shoulder.

“Just put it on my tab, all right?” Kima said, straightening her knit hat over her ears.

The barista winked at her. As Kima and Percy started off toward the door, she called out in a singsong voice, “Your tab’s getting a little long, Katie. When you gonna cash in?”

“Raincheck!” Kima replied with a casual wave, not looking back. At the look on Percy’s face, she added in a hushed voice, “Shut up, Percy.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“It was Katie, not me. And from before. Come on, we’re gonna be late.”

The possibility of lateness didn’t prevent her from stopping by her favorite deli for a breakfast sandwich. Kima left him with the car running while she hurried in to pick up her mobile order. Percy was watching the traffic cop get ever-closer from the side mirror when she returned with two brown paper bags. She peeked into each one in turn, unperturbed by the approach of the ticketer.

“One egg and cheese on an everything bagel for me, with extra hot sauce. And for you—lox and cream cheese, you pretentious bastard.”

“It’s the little things that make life tolerable,” he said, accepting the second bag.

Sandwiches in hand, they set off for several blocks in Kima’s car, to a less familiar part of the island along the Hudson. Over by the west side yard and its endless lines of empty train cars, they met up with Randy, who looked, if at all possible, shadier than usual—he had more or less the same outfit, plus a hat and scarf. Those unnecessary sunglasses still sat atop his head. Percy greeted him as cordially as if they were standing in an office building rather than a graffitied parking lot outside what looked to be a long-closed storage facility. 

On taking in the vacant space, Percy turned to Kima and said, “I see you’ve decided to have me killed.”

Regardless, he followed them around the back of the building to where a more solid-looking door than the front had a newer deadbolt. Of all the places he expected to find at the bottom of five winding flights of stairs marred by vulgar pictures drawn in spray paint, the last was a brightly-lit hall of white walls, white floors, and the sound of rapid gunfire.

Kima nudged him in the ribs. “Time to test that theory of yours, Freddy.”

Percy tore his eyes from the rows of targets to address Randy. “This is…your place?”

“A friend’s place,” said Randy, with his ever-present air of someone hiding something. “But my collection—try anything you want.”

He steered Percy past a few older folks deep into their target practice and over to the open doors of a locker, where the largest assortment of firearms he’d ever seen lay neatly on display. Percy had read about them, but to see them was something else. Shotguns and pistols, semi-automatic assault rifles, guns with strikers and guns with hammers. A mounted gun with long ribbons of ammunition.

“I bought you an hour.” Kima had appeared at Percy’s side while he was running his fingertips along the cylinder of an antique revolver. “He says there’s a course with moving targets and stuff like that. Hopefully our plan works out and you won't need to know, but…”

“No, you’re right,” Percy agreed. He picked up a glock and checked to see that it was loaded. “Let’s start small, shall we?”

The others stood back from the start of the course. It was a long hallway at the end of the range, with boxes and walls set sporadically on either side to conceal the targets. Two panels of thick glass marked the entryway for spectators to watch in safety.

“The course starts once someone hits the timer,” Randy explained from behind, gesturing to a display screen mounted on the viewer side of the glass. “Shoot at the red and white targets. Avoid the orange ones. The sensors follow your progress down the lane so the targets know when to appear or move—the idea is to be fast, but accurate. There are thirty targets. If you miss, it’ll affect your score. You got me?”

“Yes.” 

Percy checked the gun again to verify that it had fifteen bullets, even though he already knew that it did. He was about to position himself at the threshold when Kima piped up again.

“Don’t forget these—” Kima held up a black headset that looked like earmuffs.

“What are those for?”

“Jesus, Freddy, it’s a miracle you’re not already deaf.”

Percy put the earmuffs over his ears, and the room took on a hollow quietness. His own breathing became more noticeable. He willed himself not to be distracted. With a last nod to Kima, he turned on his heel. She slapped him on the ass as he walked away, and in the dim background, he heard her holler, “Go get ‘em!”

Percy had some reservations about wielding a weapon like this. While he’d never let the performance anxiety sneak onto on his face… well, it had been a while. And there was no magic to power his shots or weaken the targets. But all of those thoughts vanished from his head at the sound of the bell. The signal light flashed at the top of the course, and after that, Percy didn’t think much at all. The grip sat so easy in his palm, his finger so nicely on the trigger. 

The first target appeared, a red and white circle mounted on a metal arm. Percy fired at it without hesitating. A loud _bang_ went off, muffled through the headset, but he felt the vibration deep in his chest. His bullet went high from the difference in recoil, so he adjusted his aim, and struck the second target right through the center. He tried and failed to smother the rush of satisfaction that followed.

The rest was a matter of movement. Percy walked the course at a purposeful pace, reacting to each target as it appeared, sometimes even anticipating them. He shot at the red and white targets, held back at the orange. He ducked to catch the targets that had partial cover, pivoted and swiveled to account for the ones that moved, or hung low, or high. Halfway through, he reloaded without stopping his forward progress.

The entire ordeal took a minute, maybe even less. Only after he’d crossed the end threshold and the beep signaled his completion did he notice he was breathing heavily. The adrenaline was giving him a serious kick, and the sight of Kima jumping up and down at the other end of the corridor didn’t lesson it at all. The others that had been practicing their shots at stationary targets had stopped to watch. Too pleased with himself to play it cool, he jogged back down to the start of the course, pausing only to grab the empty magazine he’d dropped to reload. His ears were ringing despite the protection.

“What can I say, man?” Randy said, with a bemused grin that Percy had not seen before.

“I know what to say: holy shit!” Kima cheered. “Look at your score—”

“That’s ninety-six percent accuracy right there, that’s what that is,” said one of the spectators, an older man wearing safety goggles with his earmuffs around his neck.

“Yes, well, there’s always room for improvement,” Percy said. He handed the unloaded gun back to its owner, handle-first. “So what else have you got?”

* * *

They had a plan. It was riddled with holes and uncertainty, but it was still better to have this plan than to be back where he’d been, starting each morning with dry heaving and alcohol. Percy was actually pleased.

To say that they had cobbled the plan together was not entirely fair, considering that he had spent almost every waking moment of the past few weeks shaping it. There were admittedly gaps in their research that left room for guesswork at the time of execution that, while not desirable, had pretty much been his experience with these things anyway. They had the key information: a place, a time, and the right people. The trick was getting there.

“I actually went to the island, back at the beginning,” Percy told Kima one evening over dinner, a few days before.

They were dining at one of their favorite restaurants, a steakhouse on the parlor level of an old inn. The dark walls and sconce lighting somehow gave it a private feel, even while they sat elbow-to-elbow with the other patrons. Rain and sleet pinged against tall windows on the opposite end of the room, ambient noise to dozens of hushed conversations. A little tobacco smoke in the air would have made them feel like they were right at home in a cloudtop district pub. And the food… suffice to say that oysters had just been the beginning of a long tab. Not that they were counting these days.

“I feel like that’s something you should have mentioned,” said Kima, carefully pouring béarnaise over her filet mignon.

“I didn’t learn anything when I went… now I think it was just too early on,” Percy said thoughtfully. “It was one of the first things I did. Spooky graveyard full of local ghost stories—you can see the appeal.” He helped himself to another slice of grilled lamb from their shared plate in the center of the table. “Turns out I was right after all, and I just didn’t see it.”

“So how’d you get there?”

“The ferry.”

“Yeah, but _how_? I thought the city only let people go there if you had a family member or something like that. You have to pay your way on?”

“No, Frederick’s mother is buried there.”

“Oh… well, too bad we can’t just take the ferry this time.”

“Quite.” 

“I know a guy who has some connections at the DOC. Maybe he can help us out.”

Katie had a lot of friends in a lot of places and with a lot of different backgrounds, from the sort who could get you a meeting with the mayor to the type who would sell you half a dozen weapons without asking why you needed them (as evidenced by the stockpile under Percy’s couch-gone-bed). From stationing a few of those friends for just a few days, they were able to learn more than enough to pull their plan together. They learned, for instance, that some of the people who worked in operations on the island and the ferry had suddenly left their jobs a few months back, and new strangers had taken their place. One such person, before being thrust quite literally from the picture, had been Trevor. 

Percy fully expected the island to be crawling with cultists.

By the day before they had to act, Percy had worked out as much as the circumstances would permit. He spent the entire day at the library, poring over local maps. Their surveillance had shown that a few others on island (formerly including Trevor) would occasionally sneak off and disappear to the southern end, where most of the abandoned buildings still remained in their half-crumbled state. They didn’t know the exact building, but they had the general location. The peak of the solstice would occur at 11:19 p.m. eastern standard time, which was lucky, because it gave them the cover of darkness. 

The tricky thing was crossing the short expanse of open water, where they’d have nowhere to hide. Percy had hoped that since the city ran certain utilities to the island, that there would be some kind of tunnel they could follow underground. No such luck on that front. Ultimately, the best thing they could come up with was to hop along the small islands just to the north, then once nighttime came, travel south across the water. The strong flow of Long Island Sound toward East River would carry them in the right direction, so all they would have to do is not miss their mark on the northern tip of the island. And not be seen. They had started with the concept of a small sail boat, then argued it down to a row boat, and finally, to an inflatable so small that they wouldn’t be able to fit on it. One mile of free-floating from a speck of land to a slightly larger speck of land. It was… lunacy. But Percy had learned the currents, followed the weather, and could only have done more if he tested out the ride beforehand. 

He spent most of the day flicking through the notebook they’d stolen from Trevor. Most of what they’d grabbed from the apartment had been garbage—or not garbage, but documents and books that would have belonged to the _actual_ Trevor before a hijacker from the prime material plane took over his body. A few interesting items had come up, though, including this book. It was a catalogue of Trevor’s notes from early on, when he’d first made contact with the cultists through the portal. He was not, perhaps, the candidate they would have chosen, but until they’d figured out how to get more people through, he was what they’d had. 

Percy had inspected every page of the book in search for hidden clues or nougats of information, and had come to the conclusion that Trevor was not bright enough for that sort of forethought. The best he’d found was a simplified calendar of the Earthen seasons, and a note scribbled next to the date of the solstice: _total alignment every 10 years_. Or, as Percy inferred from the underlining on the page, _don’t mess this up, or you’re stuck here for the next decade_. He tried not to consider those stakes.

Trevor’s writings also described in rudimentary terms the experiments they’d done while testing out their ritual. They had sent a number of objects through the gate, both before and after Percy and Kima won the sacrificial lottery. Tons of non-magical items, then magical items that lost their enchantment when they reached the other side. Percy and Kima had discovered a handful of them while rummaging through Trevor’s apartment: some pendants like the ones Vox Machina had used to pass through the siphon to Thar Amphala, some potions (rendered inert during the transition), some miscellaneous jewelry, and handwritten notes.

Late in the afternoon, he had no choice but to conclude there was nothing left for him to know. Percy took his time in returning all of the library books to their respective shelves instead of dumping them in the return cart. He saved the heavy atlas for last, and as he used two hands to slide it back into its place beside an encyclopedia on the Americas, he wondered whether it was the last time he’d ever hold a book.

He had wiped down the table, packed and re-packed his notes, and finally slung his shoulder bag across has back. He sent Kima a message as he walked out of the marbled halls:

_3:42 p.m.: If you could have anything on Earth for dinner, what would it be?_

The reply arrived while Percy was heading down Fifth Avenue, avoiding shoppers wielding handbags and tourists with selfie sticks.

_3:55 p.m.: the chinese place in chelsea where we interviewed that lady with the fake spellbooks. ill send u my order_

_3:56 p.m.: No need._

_4:25 p.m.: thanks fam_

Kima arrived back at the apartment that evening to find it tidier than it had probably ever been. Billie Holiday was weaving melodies through speakers in the corners of the apartment. The long-cold fireplace had several logs crackling away that filled the room with a light, pleasant smokiness. She stopped in the doorway, her gym bag hanging from one hand, until her head slowly turned to where Percy stood on the other side of the kitchen island counter. He was still dressed from a day about town, a soft sweater pulled over his shirt-and-tie. A single candle burned on the far end of the counter.

Percy set his hands on the countertop and inclined his chin toward her. “Good evening, Lady Kima.”

Kima’s eyebrows shot up almost off her forehead. “I know it’s our last night,” she said wryly, “but my position hasn’t changed from the first day I met you here.”

He laughed. “I thought we should have a proper feast to set us off for tomorrow. And for my part, it comes with a confession.”

“Hoo boy, let’s hear it.” 

Kima unzipped her coat and tossed it on the back of the couch. The sweat marks had not quite dried on her tank top, but she didn’t seem bothered by it. Dropping her bag on one of the barstools, she climbed up onto the other one and set her elbows on the countertop. 

“I hereby confess,” said Percy, in an air of false grandeur, “that there are several things about this plane that I will miss when we’re gone.”

Percy made a show of rolling his sleeves up to the elbow. Then he bent down under the counter, and emerged with a large slate tablet. On top of it he’d styled a neat array of cheeses, cured meats, olives, and fruits, along with a row of grainy crackers and ramekins of hummus and whipped feta.

“The first is the charcuterie board,” he said.

Kima reached across to help herself to an olive. “Why? You can literally make this anywhere.”

“No you can’t,” Percy said, affronted. “The charcuterie board is the perfect example of what makes this plane interesting—it has pepperoncini from Italy, olives from Greece, cheese from Wisconsin, meat from three different places.” He plucked a grape from the vine and held it between his thumb and index finger. “It’s the middle of December, and this grape is as perfect as if I’d picked it fresh from the vineyards of Wildemount in the summertime.”

“So what’s your point?”

“This plane has no boundaries except the ones the humans have created to support their respective military-industrial complexes,” Percy said. “I was able to learn all the history I could ever need about the world without leaving these two hundred some-odd blocks. It’s extraordinary.”

“Okay, that’s fair. Speaking of international cuisine, where’s my chicken?”

“Relax, it’s here. Did you know your oven has a setting to keep things warm?”

“Nope.” 

Percy retrieved the chicken and broccoli from the oven and set it next to his cheese plate, along with two porcelain bowls and two sets of cutlery.

“Here you are. We can’t have you eating out of plastic takeout containers during your last feast, can we?”

“God, you’re so extra. I love it.”

“Thank you.”

“Speaking of which, I got you something…”

A forkful of chicken already speared in one hand, Kima reached into her bag with the other and pulled out a bottle of wine. She held it out for him, but he didn’t take it.

“Go on,” she said with her mouth full, giving the bottle a wave at his doubtful look. “Either we die tomorrow and it doesn’t matter, or we make it home and everything is fine again.”

“Well… all right, then.” Percy took the bottle and reached for the cabinet handle to fetch himself a wine glass. “Would you like some?”

“Nope. I’ve got mine right here—a good ole’ yankee IPA.”

Out of the bag came a box. She pried the cardboard flaps apart and cracked open a can. Percy winced at the sound as the memory of Natural Ice came to mind, and as droplets of fizzing beer dripped down on the laminate countertop. He watched in mild disgust as she took a long swig and sighed happily.

“So what else, Percy? What are your other confessions?”

“I’ll miss the music,” he said, twisting a corkscrew into the top of the wine bottle. There was a soft _pop_ as the cork came loose. Percy took his time pouring a small amount of the burgundy wine into his glass, swirled it around, and took a sip. “Oh dear.”

“What, did I buy a shitty one? The package store guy said it was good.”

“The wine is _excellent_ ,” he said. “However, I can assure you that I will be thoroughly pickled after six ounces.”

“Hey, that’s the spirit.”

Kima took the bottle back from him and started pouring it into his glass. Percy made a grab for the stem to keep it from tipping over.

“Easy, easy—” he cautioned as the wine threatened to reach the brim.

“That’s more like it.”

Triumphant, she raised her can of beer to him. He had to lift his glass with both hands to keep the wine from sloshing over. They clinked glass to aluminum and drank.

“More confessions, Percy.”

Percy sighed, but he was smirking. “I have several regrets about the way I’ve spent my time here. In hindsight only, of course. The biggest is—”

“Let me guess: you never got to go in an airplane.”

“Was it so obvious?”

“ _Please_. Give me one that’s a little more interesting.”

“In that case, let’s discuss that car of yours…”

The hours passed as quickly as they could for two people dreading and anticipating the night to come tomorrow. As predicted, Percy was drunk after his one teeming glass, which lowered his inhibition enough to pour a second. Kima’s empty beer cans lined up in a neat row along the countertop. And by eleven, they had migrated to the living room to pick at the remains of the cheese board by the dim red glow of the fireplace.

By midnight, Percy lay across the couch like a patient in a therapist’s office, his unlaced shoes dangling off one end. One foot circled slowly back and forth in time with the voice on the stereo. He was murmuring along to _(There Is No) Greater Love_ in that sleepy, singsong way one does while half asleep, his mostly empty wine glass balanced on his chest between his hands. Occasionally he would tip it into his mouth, half-attentive. Kima, as usual, had taken up her place on the loveseat. She’d never changed out of her workout clothes, but had in the course of the night undone and re-done her long braid half a dozen times. Her hat lay abandoned on the coffee table. She had been staring into the fire for several minutes while Percy dozed and the wine threatened to fall out of his hands.

“Hey Percy—” she began in a low voice.

“Hmm—?” The sound of his name prodded him back to consciousness.

“I’m a little worried about Katie.”

Percy cracked one eye open and saw that Kima had tucked her legs up against her chest, her chin propped on one knee. “It’s _fine_. Katie’s—she’s dead,” he slurred dismissively. “Katie and Frederick. Both dead.”

“Frederick might be dead, but Katie’s not,” said Kima, poking herself in the temple. “What if we go back through the portal, but she won’t let go?”

“She can’t _not_ let go. The whole point of the, er, thing, is you walk through… and you are who you were on the proper side.”

“Yeah, but what if they’re wrong about it? No one’s actually gone back before, remember?”

“Don’t you want to share your consciousness forever?” he joked.

“I really don’t,” Kima said in earnest. “I don’t think I can ever be me with two people in my head. It’s too much for one brain.”

“Then we’ll just… well, we’ll be in the magic zone again, so we’ll—we can just do a little—” he waved the fingers of one hand in a poor imitation of a somatic gesture, “—and we’ll pry her ghosty little fingers out of you.”

“I hope so,” Kima said, voice muffled against her knee. “But there’s a part of me this whole time that’s been… I dunno… hesitant to go through with the plan. And I think it’s her.”

Percy sat up a little in slightly more concern. “D’you think she’ll interfere?”

“No.” A pause. “But if I start to stab you or whatever, it’s not me!”

Percy chuckled, and the movement of his chest made the last few ounces of wine swill dangerously in the glass. “No stabbing, please.”

“If she starts to get weird, promise me you’ll get me through the portal,” Kima said.

“Sure. I’ll just… scoop you up and carry you through,” he said. “Or give you a little shove.”

“I’m serious, Percy. Promise me.”

He yawned. “Yes, all right, I promise.”

Kima sighed in relief. “Thank you. Now I have… something else to give you. But don’t get mad.”

“Mad—?”

The sound of her footsteps crossing behind him and back to her bedroom was enough to draw the last threads of his sobriety to full attention. With a lethargic groan, Percy heaved himself up and swung his legs off of the couch. He set his glass on the table, craning his neck over his shoulder to try to see where she had gone. By then, she was already on her way back, her hands clutched against her chest.

“Remember when we were at Trevor’s place, and we found a bunch of stuff that they sent him as, like, part of their tests or whatever?” When Percy nodded groggily, Kima went on, “I found some more things in his desk when I did that last check. One was this—”

She opened one hand. A silver chain spilled out, and there, dangling at the end, was a holy symbol of the Platinum Dragon. Kima slipped the chain around her neck and tucked it under her shirt with a visible shiver.

“And then I also found these.” She raised her other fist, undoubtedly in reference to whatever she had closed inside it. “And at first I didn’t tell you, because it made me really fuckin’ angry. And I’ve been worried about what might happen when I go back, if I can never be myself again, and what Allie might think of me. But then I decided that was a stupid reason not to tell you, and then I just didn’t tell you… I guess for no good reason, but—”

“What _is_ it?”

“Hold out your hand.”

Obligingly, Percy held up one outstretched hand. Kima placed something small in his palm. The gentle clink of metal on metal sent his nerves tingling. His fingers closed over automatically, before he’d even had a peek. It took several seconds to muster the willpower to make his fingers open again, and when he did, he knew what he saw before he’d seen it: two metal bands. One of the two rings was much smaller and plainer than the other—a thin platinum circlet, etched with scratches from years and years of brawling. The other, a finely-wrought work of gold, with branches encircling a polished green stone.

One glance was enough to confirm it—even with his eyes filling with tears, he’d have known it by the feel alone. Absently, he handed Kima’s ring back to her. He examined the other one carefully, rubbing his thumb against the engraving on the inside, before he tried to put it on. It slid back into place with just the right amount of snugness. A perfect fit. Percy was so beguiled by it that he didn’t realize Kima was still talking.

“—but then I thought maybe I should wait until—”

Her rambling cut short when he pulled her into a hug.

“Thank you,” he whispered hoarsely.

Kima gave him a drunken pat on the head. “Okay, Percy.”

She stepped back from him once he let her go, and he returned to studying the ring. The weight of it on his hand felt like an assurance. What little uncertainty had weighed in his chest stepped aside, leaving resolve in its place.

“All right…” Percy felt his head nodding in a shallow, distracted way as he finally tore his eyes from his wedding band and met Kima’s determined expression. “Let’s do this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all things are finally HAPPENING! I'm actually getting pretty amped about editing the next few chapters. Thanks for spending your last 5800 words of time with meeee


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter content warnings: canon-appropriate violence.

Chapter 10

The wide, white-tiled hospital corridors had the exact same look and smell as the day he first snuck through them. The feeling of it had changed, though.

Percy rounded the corner to find the work station vacant, but the photograph on the desk was the same, and so were the telltale wallet and keys sitting by the keyboard.

“Can I help you, sir?”

Percy offered a serene smile to the woman in Disney-printed scrubs who had appeared on the other side of the hallway. He lifted the metal hanger into view.

“Just dropping off some dry cleaning for Michael Owens,” he said. “Is this still his station?”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s his. He’s at lunch, but you can just leave it there if you want…”

“I’ll do that, thank you.”

Percy draped the black leather jacket across the back of Michael’s chair, taking care to smooth out the plastic cover sheet from the dry cleaner’s. The woman’s footsteps faded, and once he felt he was alone, he took a slip of paper from his back pocket and read it to himself once more:

_Michael—_

_Thank you for the unwitting donation of your jacket. It saved me (arguably more than once). However, I no longer need it, as I have recently won the lottery and fallen in love. I am leaving the country to start a new life, and now return this item to you. It has been professionally cleaned, and mended good as new. As a token of my gratitude, I leave you with the enclosed. Please send my regards to Dr. Hernandez, and tell her all is well._

_With my sincerest and profound thanks,_

_Frederick Zimmerman_

Considering that he’d written the note last night with Kima while they were both still drunk, it was not so bad. Percy folded the note, chuckling to himself, and tucked it into the plain white envelope with Michael’s name printed across the front. Inside, his handwritten sentiments sat alongside ten crisp hundred-dollar bills—the last of Kima and Percy’s pooled funds, on the last of his morning’s trips to selected libraries, museums, pubs, and a certain food stand peddling peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. If tonight went to plan, they would have no use for American money.

Percy sealed the envelope and clipped it to the front of the jacket before heading out into the busy street. With Christmas just days away, the city’s inhabitants had lunged into a full jovial swing. Shoppers rushed by with their arms full of bags and their hands full of paper coffee cups. Multicolored sting lights blinked down at him from storefronts and light posts. Several groups of tourists fell upon him in search of Rockefeller Center, and he gladly sent them in the right direction, with detailed instructions he was sure that they’d forget. For a city made mostly of a parallel grid, people got lost so easily.

Flurries were falling by the time Percy hopped up the stone steps of Kima’s apartment and let himself inside. On his way in, he took note of the overflowing garbage bin.

“I see you’re finally done cleaning out the fridge,” he said as he entered. He had to almost shout over the heavy music playing throughout the unit.

“Almost,” came Kima’s voice, just out of sight. 

He stepped into the kitchen to find her on her knees in front of the open refrigerator, scrubbing out the produce drawer with a sponge. A pair of yellow rubber gloves came almost up to her elbows.

“Do you need help?” he said. He tossed a brown paper bag on the counter. “I got you one last sandwich from the deli. I’ve had mine already.”

Kima wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. “Thanks. I’m about done here.”

“How about with the packing?”

“Mine’s done—double-check it if you want. Otherwise I think we’re pretty much good to go.”

“Alright. How’s your head?”

“It’s great,” she said, in a tone that suggested otherwise. “Yours?”

“Same as yours. If there’s nothing left to do, I might… lay down for a bit.”

“Take my bed if you want some quiet. I don’t need it anymore.”

“That’s all right, the noise won’t bother me.”

Percy felt a little odd doing nothing, but then, everything was already done. They even had multiple timers set to warn them when to leave. All that stood between them and the first stage of their plan was a few more hours—he might as well try to nap, or at least sit and think about his place in the universe. But first, he did go back to the set of bags on the coffee table. Kima’s backpack he left untouched, but he looked through the other two one last time to check that everything was accounted for. It was, of course. So Percy shifted the pile of Kima’s laundered clothes from his couch and stretched out on it. Between the gnashing guitar riffs and the sound of Kima chucking food into the garbage bin, he had no expectation of falling asleep. He closed his eyes and sighed, and tried to clear the uncertain future from his head—

And then, suddenly, Kima was shaking his knee. Percy jolted awake with a gasp, afraid for a fleeting instant that he’d slept through the plan. His glasses hung askew from one ear.

“What time is it?”

“Time to go,” Kima said. She was already dressed and wearing her backpack.

They spoke little as Percy changed clothes and shouldered his own pack. He gave the apartment one last glance-over before he picked up the duffel bag and followed her out the door. Their ride pulled up as he followed her one last time down the front steps. Percy didn’t recognize the car or the driver—an older woman driving a black sports car—nor did he speak to her during the ride. He let Kima do the talking, which amounted to little more than, “Hey. Let’s go.”

Percy hadn’t been in many cars other than Kima’s. Over the course of his time in the city, he’d grown to think them pointless and inconvenient unless he was traveling late at night. This woman had a much lighter foot than Kima, which made for a more pleasant trip than he’d expected, even while crammed into the back seat with Kima and their luggage. The car ride took a little more than an hour. The driver skirted up the west side, then hopped across to the east, until they had departed Manhattan Island. Eventually the car pulled into a park. Percy and Kima gathered their bags, and after Kima handed over a large roll of cash, they turned out on foot.

They found their next stop after ten minutes of walking through the park. What few people they’d seen on their way down the path had disappeared by the time they reached the spot—a boat yard situated at the north end of the bay, where most of the millionaires’ toy yachts stood on elevated stilts, shrink-wrapped in white until spring. A few boats were too large to take out of the water. Fewer small boats, including one motor boat no larger than a dinghy, remained tied off alongside them. Percy and Kima trudged all the way down the dock toward it, the creak of the wooden boards almost masked by the sound of water rippling beneath.

“Here’s our chariot,” Kima announced, throwing her bag into the bottom of the boat and climbing in after it.

Percy waited until she was situated at the stern before he dropped down at the bow. All in all, the boat measured about eight feet long. A little outboard engine was mounted on the end of it, and someone had left a pair of black life vests sitting on the seat. He slipped his arms into the holes and buckled it up in front. The gesture made their pending swim much more real. Percy shivered.

“All right,” he said, taking in a heavy breath and watching as Kima clipped into her own life vest. “I hope Katie can actually drive this thing.”

“Oh, she can drive it. Just watch I don’t elbow you in the face when I start the thing.”

To turn it on, she had to stand and face the rear of the boat, bent over the motor. She grasped a knob and jerked her elbow back, yanking a cord. The engine sputtered, roared, and finally settled into a quiet puttering as she set it into gear. It was too dark to see across the bay, but from their current position, their ultimate landing point on Hart Island was just a touch under a mile to the southeast. Instead of heading directly toward it, they went north. The stealth component was imperative, and even the quietest motor was just too loud to risk being heard. 

Katie pulled through again. She steered the boat a mile northeast through the pitch black, toward one of the larger islands. The night was calm, but the boat still rocked gently as it pushed against the outward flow of the tide, and even the kindest wind out on the water was enough to make them draw their hoods up over their heads. They reached their landmark without incident, and without any fishing boats passing close enough to force eye contact. Percy navigated them to the area of the first of three islands where they’d arranged to find their next ride. Sure enough, as Kima approached an empty dock, they found the row boat waiting for them there. Kima hopped out to inspect it as Percy tied the motorboat off on a cleat.

“Island one: check!” she announced. “Hope you’re ready to put my classes to good use.”

From there, Percy rowed them due east to the next destination. Half a mile had not seemed very far from the comfort of his library cubby, but out here on the water, it could have been ten miles. After just a few minutes, his arms were burning worse than any workout he’d endured at Katie’s instruction. The tendons in his injured hand began to spasm as he gripped the paddle. Rowing on its own was a laborious task made more difficult by their combined weight, the weight of their luggage, and his need to move so, so precisely as to not make any loud splashes. He spent the majority of the time trying to focus on anything else but the swelling lactic acid in his upper body, but Kima could still hear it in his increasingly heavy breathing.

“You sound a little rough there, buddy,” she observed from behind him, where she sat tucked into the bow, her arms draped over the sides with one hand trailing in the water. “Maybe I should have had you do more burpees.”

“You can—take over—if you—want,” he managed, between rows.

“Nah. Too busy enjoying the view,” she answered.

“I hope—you mean—the island.”

“Yeah, that too. Speaking of which, we’re just about there.” The boat lurched as Kima got to her feet to have a better look. “Maybe a hundred yards. Take it a little to the left. That way we’ll hit the sand.”

He could have cheered when the hull finally bumped against solid ground. Island two: check, with one last leg to go.

Percy let go of the oars with a stifled moan of relief. While he took a minute to stretch his arms and back, Kima leapt out over the few feet of water onto the loose rocks that made up the shore, a spool of rope wrapped on her arm. She pulled the boat as far onto shore as she could with Percy doubled over in it, massaging the cramp out of his right hand. He left her to unload their bags onto the beach.

“Don’t worry,” she said, once he had joined her on dry land, “we don’t need our arms for the next part.”

This second island hardly deserved the term—it had barely enough land mass for more than a few trees and place to stash their boat—but location-wise, it was as good a spot as they could have hoped for. With the sluggish pace of those dreading their next step, they pulled their wetsuits out of their bags and changed into them without speaking. In the shared bag, Percy found two pairs of flippers and the inflatable raft, which filled with air when he pulled the drawstring. He carefully stowed their bags in the shallow center of the raft, then tied them down as a secondary measure. He checked and double-checked the velcro wrist straps and the grip lines, clipped into his life vest, secured his glasses, and only once he had no other reason for delay did he announce they were ready to launch.

She had been pinning her long braid close to her head. When Percy finally turned around, she was snapping on a black swim cap. Together, they carried the float to the edge of the beach and placed it in the water. Then they donned their flippers and their hats, and there was nothing left but to swim. The air hung just below freezing tonight, which meant the water was warmer at a balmy five and a half degrees Celsius.

Percy crouched low and stuck his hands in the frigid water. “Remember to give yourself a second to let the cold shock pass. If you put your hands in first, it should lessen the—”

A soft splash went off to his left as Kima walked straight in, all the way up to her armpits. She inhaled sharply and froze with her arms hovering parallel to the water’s surface. Kima had to take a moment of visible willpower to break the paralysis.

She grabbed hold of her safety line and secured it to her arm before she started towing the inflatable out into deeper water.

“Hurry up!” she said tersely.

With no room left for delay, Percy abandoned his trepidation and rushed to catch up with her. The shock of the cold was monumental—it simultaneously drew all the breath from his body, and forced him to gasp at the intensity of it. In that moment, his brain flashed with the memory from a lifetime ago, when he’d plunged into a freezing river to escape the endless torture of the Briarwoods, bloodied and starved and reeling with the choice he’d made to abandon Cassandra. The impact on his body felt much the same.

Oddly, the main difference between then and now was fear. Despite the momentary sense of physiological panic as his autonomic nervous system took over, a sense of calm had come over him tonight that he didn’t remember from before. Interesting that it should be now, as he waded ever closer toward the Briarwoods. 

Percy granted himself a few slow, deep breaths to let the cold response pass before catching up to Kima. He reached her just as she got deep enough for her feet to leave the ground. He fastened himself to the raft and grabbed the rope next to hers.

“We have to be quick, or we’ll freeze,” he said. “Or worse, someone will see us.”

He could already hear her teeth chattering. “W-waiting on you, Percy.”

Percy pushed them out further, Kima floating alongside him, until the water became too deep. Then he gave one last push and kicked off the ground, sending them forward toward the island. One mile to go.

Ordinarily, with their having no practice in the water, to swim that distance would take quite a while. Percy bargained that the flippers would cut that time significantly—the longer they were in the cold, the greater the risk of hypothermia. It was a worthy trade-off for the stealthiness. Here in the dark, dressed in all black, they were just two heads hiding behind an inflatable that could pass for debris. Whatever light from the land that cast shadows on the water would help more than hurt—it made the surface of the water dynamic in a way that obfuscated the view. To see them, someone would have to be posted up on the opposite end of the island from the most likely location of the portal, and they would have to be actively looking to notice them. 

They stayed as silent as they could, speaking only as needed and stopping their kicks short below the surface to avoid any splashing. The wool hats pulled over their swim caps kept their heads dry, but even in the calm night, the water sloshed up the back of his neck and into his mouth. Percy resisted the urge to cough at the brackish taste. Before long, he couldn’t feel his fingers, or his arms. His legs kept on kicking, automatically, despite the numbness. 

“I can see it,” Kima said in a strained whisper. “Let’s take it a little to the right. Yeah, perfect.”

The cold had penetrated so deeply in his bones that he could hardly feel it now. The long minutes ticked by with his ears piqued by every errant sound. Percy half expected to hear shouts from the island, a warning sound, even gunfire. He heard nothing but motor boats far off in the distance, traffic noise passing across the open water like a current of its own, the increasingly ragged sound of Kima’s breath as she tried to keep it quiet. The island formed in his vision as a dark shape emerging from a darker one. At first it was just an amorphous mass against the skyline. Then it grew trees, and the geography began to take form—steep edges like shallow cliffs, dotted with foliage. Not a moving figure to be seen along the shore. 

Finally— _finally_ —the tip of Percy’s flipper caught loose stone. He kicked the flippers off once it became too hard to maneuver, and she followed suit as soon as she could touch bottom. Breathing heavy, they rushed as quietly as they could to get into the line of trees, sliding and wincing with bare feet on the jagged rocks, the float carried between them. 

The moment they had cover, a new kind of urgency overtook them. Percy fumbled his numb fingers on the ropes to untie their bags, and once he had them off, tore through for the two soft packages within.

“Here—” He tossed Kima one of the packages. She was already halfway out of her wetsuit, and with her limbs as cold as his, she made a grab for it but couldn’t quite grasp it. “Oops, sorry.”

Percy stripped naked and dried off. Perhaps his best idea of all had been to stow their towels and dry clothes in a foil-lined bag full of heat packs that people used in their gloves when they went skiing. His skin was mostly numb, and fiery red with cold, but the warm clothes still felt luxurious as he pulled them on.

The next step was a short rest. They’d built it into the plan to account for the possibility one of them might suffer an adverse reaction to the cold, but they’d made even better time than expected. Percy and Kima scouted out a secluded spot for themselves and their gear a few yards back from the water, tucked under a washed-out dune covered with brush. For the next hour, they sat close together, wrapped in a heated blanket and sipping hot tea from a thermos that they passed back and forth. He could feel her shivering under the fresh layers of clothing, a symptom that subsided over the course of their break. Once he was certain that his fingers had thawed enough to wield a weapon, they rose and stretched and prepared for the last leg of the journey.

Whatever they didn’t need from here on out, they left behind. He’d have felt worse about abandoning their things on the bank of Long Island Sound were it not for the accumulation of trash already washed up on the shore. Just as that thought was crossing his mind, he watched Kima pull her phone out, check the clock one last time, then casually drop it in the water.

The luggage bag had a few key items left inside: the kevlar vests that served as their best substitute for armor, some miscellaneous items that included a pair of gas masks, and their weapons. Kima put her vest on first before tugging her holy symbol out from under her shirt. It rested against the outside of the vest, a glint of platinum on black.

Percy slipped the straps of his dual holster over his shoulders and tucked one gun onto each side against his ribs. Another went on his left hip, along with a thin blade. On the right side he had ammunition, a canister of pepper spray, a dagger, and a taser that he was more excited to use than he was comfortable admitting. Kima, meanwhile, had fewer options on her person. She sheathed a dagger on her back and on one thigh. At the moment, she was warming up her arm by swinging around a sword—no Holy Avenger to be sure, but the biggest and longest sword he could fit into their bag. Percy had bought it online from a guy out in the Midwest who made well-balanced replica swords, then given it to Kima to sharpen to a deadly point with a whetstone. It had taken her days to refine it.

“You ready?” she asked, slinging it into place across her back.

Percy nodded, stretching the band of his gas mask. The filter would protect against noxious fumes, but more importantly at this stage, the green lenses lent some necessary dark vision. 

He paused in putting it on for one last look with his own sight. The cityscape glittered to the south, reaching far beyond his sight and across the water, seemingly infinite in its expanse. He heard the noise as loud as ever from miles away. The people and the cars and the clamor of millions, all breathing together under the skyline.

“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” he said to Kima, but when he turned around, she had already gone.

Percy secured the mask over his face and glasses, and followed Kima into the brush.

They set off into darkness, the sound of their footsteps masked by the current rushing past them to the mouth of the river. The trees along the western side provided some cover, and once that cover grew thin, they followed the last few trees across the center and began to chase down the eastern side. Neither person nor animal crossed their path until they had approached a crumbling compound made up of several long buildings positioned in an open rectangle. As they came around the side, they stopped short as Kima spotted a cloaked figure about thirty feet off. 

That person turned out to be a human woman. She was donned in plain leather armor that did not mesh with this plane, and she did not notice the two intruders until Percy had her windpipe pinched in the crook of his elbow.

“A sword?” Kima said in a disbelieving hush. “All the cool technology in this world, and she’s got this shitty sword!”

“You have a sword,” Percy replied, swaying jerkily back and forth as the woman silently thrashed in his arms.

“Yeah, but that’s my _thing_. She’s just some untrained cultist. She’d be better off with a gun or a cool, like, cyber-punk blade or something.” Kima dropped the flimsy sword to the ground. She had already taken the radio and earpiece from the woman and put it on herself. She had one finger in her ear, wiggling the piece of plastic into place. “Okay lady, you have one chance to come clean. How many of you are out here?”

“Careful now,” Percy warned in the woman’s ear, and he loosened his arm enough for her to take in a gasp. 

“T-twelve,” she choked, after a few long seconds of catching her breath.

“Twelve before, or after Delilah?” Kima said.

“… Before,” the woman said begrudgingly.

Kima stared at her for a few tense moments, searching her face for a lie. “Where’s the portal?”

The woman made a noncommittal shrugging gesture. Percy took the blade from his belt and laid the edge below her chin, pressing enough to make her aware of it, but not so hard as to stop her from speaking. A sad noise escaped her mouth, a cross between a moan and a sob.

“In there.” She jerked her head to the left, toward one of the buildings. “Below.”

“Is Delilah down there, too?”

“She’s…” The woman seemed to struggle for a moment, before a calmness overtook her. She took a sudden deep breath and started to yell, “Intrud—!”

Acting on instinct, Percy clapped a hand down over the woman’s open mouth. She would probably have bitten down on it, had he not also pressed into the blade and drawn it across her throat. Kima ducked out of the way just in time to avoid the spray of blood. The warmth ran over Percy’s hand and between his fingers as it started to pour through the woman’s teeth. She bucked against him in an involuntary gesture, then went heavy and still. 

“Damn it,” said Percy. He hadn’t realistically believed that he could, or even should, get out of this without killing anyone. He just hadn’t thought it would be the first person they came across.

They dragged the body out of view of the building and propped it up against a tree. Percy wiped his hands and the blade on her cloak before they stole off toward the building. It had one door facing south, with someone positioned out front, holding another shitty sword by his side. There was a window on the opposite wall, out of sight from the door. He boosted Kima up to look inside, then vaulted her in once the coast was clear. She was much stealthier without her armor—when she opened the door from within, the man didn’t have enough warning to respond before she was on him. By the time Percy had jogged back around to the door to assist, Kima was pulling the electronics off of his corpse.

“Put this on.” She pressed the radio into his hands. “I just heard them ask for a status from outside. No one’s answering—hurry—”

Without properly clipping it into place, Percy jammed the piece into his ear, pressed the broadcast button on the radio, and said in his most neutral voice, “All clear.”

A silence followed. They held their breath, Kima’s eyes wide, until Percy heard a voice come through from the other end, “Basement level one, report.”

A moment’s pause, and then a different voice: “Clear here as well. We’re getting ready for transport.”

“Good. We’re about to open the gate.”

“Understood. We’ll be right down.”

Kima elbowed Percy and ducked through the door, Percy following behind as he tried to clip the radio into place without getting tangled up in the wire. The room opened up into a large, empty space that could have been a factory floor as easy as it could have been a hospital. The ancient tile underfoot was more broken than not, and half buried beneath dirt and roots that had pushed up through it. Vines had crept up through the buckling walls and forced cracks to the outside. The soft debris muffled their footsteps as they made their way across the room, in search of an exit. They found it along the opposite wall—a pair of rusted metal doors thrown open to a dark and dirty staircase. 

Percy took the lead this time. He tread lightly down the stairs with Kima close behind, then down the long hallway. A number of doors lined the walls. They glanced covertly into open ones as they passed through, listening at the closed ones. No major sounds caught their attention. Halfway down the hall, they came across another descending stair. Kima was about to step down when Percy grabbed her by the arm.

He held up one finger and mouthed the words, “Basement level one.”

Kima shrugged dismissively and pointed toward the stairwell. “Be right _down_ ,” she whispered, repeating the last they’d heard over the speaker.

He had just opened his mouth to argue when a crash sounded to their right, maybe a dozen yards away. They both whipped around, blades in hand. Nothing moved. Percy nodded his head insistently in the direction of the sound, and after a moment of annoyed hesitation, Kima followed him further down the hallway. 

Near the end, they came upon a closed door, steel in color but splotched with rust. A bit of yellow light peaked out from underneath it. Kima pressed her ear to the door and listened with her eyes closed. She raised one finger, and then a second, and then she pointed to one side of the room. Two people, on the right. Percy nodded. Slowly, without jostling it, Kima set her hand on the doorknob and turned it less than a millimeter. When it emitted a loud squeak, she sighed loudly and barged her way inside.

This room was much smaller than the open space they’d entered into. Percy pulled his mask off as he followed Kima inside, and blinked at the surprising brightness of the light. Square room, four walls, and—prison bars?

One of the two people standing by the bars let out a shout as Kima jumped on her. Percy went for the other. The young man tried to duck out of the way as Percy reached, but he mistook the target—Percy had grabbed not for the man, but for the cord of the radio. Percy yanked the cable free from the input, then seized the man by his shirt collar and forced him up against the peeling wallpaper. The man’s sword fell from his hand with a loud _clang!_ Beside him, the other cultist made a horrible gurgling sound as Kima pulled her sword free from her stomach.

“Talk or die,” Percy said, with a nod to the person bleeding out a foot away.

Up close, the man looked closer to seventeen. His sandy blonde hair hung in his face like a stringy mop, blue eyes peering back at Percy with evident surprise. 

“What—how—?” the boy sputtered.

Percy gave him a keen look. “Did you all not know we were coming? What did you think happened to Trevor?”

“Trevor—?” The man’s face slowly turned from confusion to comprehension. “We thought he—he run off with the other ones.”

“Other ones?”

“T-the traitors,” he stammered. “Abandoned us. We thought T-Trevor lost his nerve.”

“I see.” Despite the tension and the adrenaline, Percy heard himself laugh. “Having trouble keeping unsupervised recruits in line, have you? I don’t blame them, really. Why follow all these rules when you live in the land of vaccines and pizza delivery?”

The boy just looked confused and alarmed at Percy’s reaction. He looked even more so once Percy doubled up on him and gently pushed the point of his blade into his shirt, nudging just under the ribcage.

“Why don’t you join them?” said Percy. “You could do well here, if you purged all this nonsense from your head.”

The young face seemed contemplative, but then, to Percy’s regret, it hardened. “My life is for the Whispered One,” he said.

Out of the corner of his vision, Percy saw a hand flash out from under his cloak and come up with a dagger. Before the arm could swing up to hit him with it, though, Percy leaned into the hilt of his knife and pressed it up into the man’s chest. The hand holding the dagger opened reflexively. The man’s eyes darted around, desperate, the life leaving them faster and faster, and when they locked onto Percy, the man looked almost surprised to see him.

“That’s disappointing.” Percy let the weight slide across the wall and off of his blade. He squatted down to check the man’s body for any other weapons or items of interest. Finding nothing, he pulled the end of the dead man’s coat up and threw it over the face. “I suppose we’d better move—”

“Um, Percy?” Kima said, from behind him.

He turned around. Kima was standing at the bars of what appeared to be a singular cell, peering down at something within. Her sword hung loosely by her side, its tip digging an idle line into the dirt.

“What is it?” 

Percy rose and crossed over to join her. When he finally saw what Kima was staring at, he stopped mid-step. Crouched in the far corner of the cell, as far away from the door as one could get, was a person. More specifically, a woman with pale white skin and round, fearful eyes. Her auburn hair hung over her shoulders in a knotted mess. She would have been strikingly beautiful, were she not so disheveled. Her clothes had a rumpled, filthy look to them. Her eye makeup had smudged and run, leaving smears of black down her cheeks. She looked to have done an awful lot of crying, with still some crying to spare.

She pressed herself even closer to the wall as Percy approached the bars. He flicked his wrist to get the excess blood off of his blade, then sheathed it back on his hip.

“Ah,” he said flatly. “Delilah.”

The woman began to weep at the name, but it wasn’t a vengeful cry, or even a sad one—her voice rang clear with agonized frustration.

“Please, you have the wrong person!” she wept. “I don’t know who Delilah is.”

Percy glanced backwards towards the hallway door. It was still open from when they’d burst through, but the threshold was vacant. In the minute or so it had taken them to get down here, the radio had been silent. That couldn’t last much longer.

“Who are you?” he said to the woman.

“My name is Helen,” she said in a rush. “I’m a nurse. I live in Brooklyn. I don’t know why I’m here—I don’t—”

“How did you get here?”

She shook her head frantically, new tears running down the sides of her face. “I was just coming home from work. Some people grabbed me, and I woke up here. They’re looking for Delilah, but I swear I’m not her! I don’t know who she is.”

Percy craned his neck to get a better look at her through the bars. He would recognize her face anywhere, on any plane, because he had dreamed it a thousand times over. It was the face that he’d seen in the halls of his home, backlit by the sound of his siblings’ dying screams. It was the face that lurked across the bars of a Whitestone dungeon, where he lay chained and starving, his wrists shackled over his head. It was the face that smirked and whispered orders to Anna Ripley as she stood over his prone body, lancet in hand. Percy heard it like a mantra: _try the club, try the blade, try the cat-of-nine. Make him beg, but do not let him die… Break him, erase him, drain him out. Once he’s empty, we’ll fill in what we like…_

Kima’s hand on his forearm brought him back to the present. 

“—Percy?”

Percy blinked hard. He was gripping the bars of the cell. When his vision cleared, Delilah was still looking up at him from the wrong side of the prison cell, but it wasn’t her face. It was Helen’s face. He thought on what Trevor had told him about the multiplicity of the universe. How frustrating it must have been to troll through so many realities in search for the one with their leader, only to find her unwilling to embrace their vision for her. No doubt they had promised her power, and magic, and the left-hand seat next to a god. What had they gotten instead? A nurse from Brooklyn who just wanted to go home.

In the earpiece, the voice from downstairs rang into Percy and Kima’s ears: “Jarod, Sharla, where are you? The gate is open. We need to get Delilah through immediately so we can raise the graves.”

Without glancing away, Percy said, “She must not be allowed to pass through the portal. If she does, she will step into Delilah’s space.”

“It’s not really _her_ , though, is it?” said Kima. 

“It will be at home, as much as you’re Katie here.”

The woman threw herself forward toward the bars, her desperation having grown greater than her fear. She crawled over to them on her forearms and set up on her knees, hands folded into one another as if in prayer. “Please, I’m begging you—”

“What are we supposed to do with her?”

“—just let me go home—”

“Nothing,” said Percy.

Before Kima could react, he’d drawn one of the firearms from its holster and fired it at the woman. She gasped, careened, then toppled over on her side.

“Percy, what the _fuck_.” Kima took a step away from him.

“The sedative will wear off in about an hour,” he said casually, stowing the tranquilizer gun back in its holster. “We need to hurry.”

“Hang on—”

Kima scrambled over to the dead body of the female guard and grabbed the ring of keys from her belt. She went back to the prison cell, leaving a small trail of bloody footprints behind her, and tossed the keys to the far inner corner of the cell.

This time, there was no point trying to be stealthy about it. They moved back through the hallway and down the flight of stairs. At the bottom, there was just one door. Urgent voices carried through it. Percy braced himself and drew another one of the guns. He curled his fingers tight around the grip, ignorant to the persistent pain in his hand.

He met Kima’s eyes. She nodded. They pulled their masks up over their faces. He nudged his head toward the door and held the gun upright, elbow bent at ninety degrees. With one rapid motion, Kima kicked it in. Percy got the quickest possible glance at the room. It was as big as the initial foyer, lit by bulbs that dangled from the ceiling. There were several hooded figures—he didn’t have time to count how many, but it was at least the eight that should have remained—and at the far end, constructed from what looked to be stone and metal, was a single enormous archway built against the wall. The space beneath the arch looked blurred with hazy light and movement, like tendrils of smoke whirling up around the inside of a lantern.

The rest was chaos. Percy fired off three rounds of tear gas pellets—one left, one right, one center—and in they went. They kept as close as possible, but inevitably, he lost sight of Kima. Someone overcame the hacking and coughing brought on by the gas to throw down some smoke. The room clouded with a haze, made worse by the lightbulbs overhead. Percy dropped the tear gas gun and took out his blade as a cloaked shape appeared before him.

The first one was not a problem. The attacker was partially blinded and coughing, and Percy overcame him while he was bent over double, fumbling with his weapon. The second attacker was wearing a gas mask and almost cut Percy’s ear off, but he parried the blow, and the cultist’s short sword slid away, grazing the top of his shoulder instead. Percy flinched as the sharp pain preceded the long-forgotten sensation of blood trickling down the inside of his sleeve. He hadn’t gotten in a proper fight almost since Vesper was born, save for the occasional spat or spar—his sword-arm took a few swings to warm up, but by the time the cultist finally hit the dirt-and-stone ground, he was feeling a little more optimistic.

“Kima!” he called out, muffled through the mask.

There was a crashing sound and a loud _oof_ to his left as she came into view, wrapped around the shoulders of a huge man from behind. The man keeled over onto his face due to the sword sticking up at the base of his neck. Kima climbed off of him as he lay twitching on the ground.

“Two down on my end,” she said, breathing heavily.

“Same here.”

“Good. Should mean only four more. I haven’t seen anyone casting the resurrection.”

“Nor have I, but the portal is that way—”

“C’mon, let’s—look out!”

Percy swung around just in time to sidestep another blow as it came down toward his head. Kima sprung on the attacker, swinging her sword with ease and strength despite its size. He guarded her back as she took down an older woman wielding a pair of daggers.

“Three more,” Kima corrected, straightening up.

“Not quite.”

The smoke had begun to dissipate. He could see other shadows moving around now, looking for them with weapons drawn. There were four closing in, and over by the portal, a fifth. Percy pointed to the latter shape with his sword.

“That one!” he said.

But first, they had to get through the wall. Percy stepped up to meet the first as Kima sprung past him at the second. The fight couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but the clamor and the exertion seemed to go on and on. The two of them were outnumbered, but far from outskilled—Percy grunted through several more hits. A few scrapes and a jab to the thigh were a small price to pay for their progress. He did have one moment of fear when one of them got him into a grapple and the other tried to chop his head off. A lucky dodge caught the tip of the blade against his goggles, where it scraped a line against the green lens. Percy managed to cut his way free and bear down on one of the assailants. By then, Kima had already rid herself of the other two cultists and begun tearing after the last one—the caster—who they could now see had moved back toward the door they’d entered through and was frantically writing out sigils on the ground with a piece of chalk.

The person glanced up, saw Kima barreling over, and stood. It was a younger woman, a human that Percy didn’t recognize. She had a waifish stature but a determined look on her face, and as Kima began to close the gap, she stood and drew her own sword from her belt. Percy whipped out his gun—the real one this time—and prepared to fire, but the last cultist he’d been left to deal with took that instant to hit him again. The shot flew off to the left of its target as the cultist struck Percy in the back. The vest took most of the blow, but it sent the gun skittering across the room in one direction, and Percy in the other. He was getting to his feet, head spinning, when the cultist rounded on him. The sword came down. Percy rolled out of the way, managed to pull his taser free from his belt, and thrust it up into the cultist’s face. A strangled shriek followed, and the other man hit the ground. Percy jumped on him, wrestled the sword from his hands, and stabbed him with it.

His body was starting to actually register the pain. Percy stood up, wincing. Across from the portal, by the door, Kima was locked in a fight with the caster, who was putting up surprising competition. He looked around and spotted the gun a few yards away in the wrong direction. Not enough time. He took off toward Kima instead, pulling his last dagger free. He had just about joined them when he saw a flash of movement in the doorway. Another figure stepped into the room—a cloaked stranger wielding a sword, taking aim, out of Percy’s reach—

“Kima, behind!”

Kima spun around. The strike that would have caught the back of her neck struck her sword instead. She grunted under the force, knees buckling. She pushed back with two hands, barely holding the newcomer away. In the moment that Kima had her back turned, the caster took her chance. Percy watched her thrust her arm back in preparation, and in the split second he had left, he leapt forward. His dagger lashed out at the caster at the same time she stabbed out toward Kima, but Percy was between them now. He felt resistance as his blade struck the woman in the side and scraped across her armor, and a pained shout sounded out into the room. It was close by, and loud—his own voice. Percy looked down and saw the hilt sticking out from his abdomen.

“Percy!”

He heard his name, but he was too disoriented to tell from where. Somehow he was on his knees, and his mask had clouded over, and he couldn’t see—

Kima was still fighting. He had a dim awareness of metal on metal. There were heavy sounds, and some gasping, and someone hit the ground. They wouldn’t make it to the portal if he couldn’t help. Percy fumbled around blindly, feeling for the hilt of the dagger. He had just found it and wrapped his hands around it, and was bracing himself when a voice came up much closer to him.

“Stop it, stop, _stop!_ ” Someone was slapping his hands away from the dagger. It was Kima. “Don’t touch it, or you’ll bleed out!”

Suddenly his vision partly returned as the mask was ripped free from his face. The gas had diffused almost entirely, but it left a heavy sting in the air that made him cough, and then gasp at the intensity of the pain. It didn’t ache, but it jolted up from the source and throughout his chest. Like the long claw of a dragon, splitting his gut in two. He had thought he was on his feet, but Kima was kneeling over him, propping him up against the wall. Behind her, two bodies lay across the ground, one partially on top of the other. She had pulled off her own mask, and in the blurriness, he saw her nose was bleeding.

“It’s like…” He’d meant to joke about the day he found her in the city, when she’d cried so hard her nose had bled. There was something funny about it, but he couldn’t put the joke together. Speaking had made the pain so much worse, and it knocked the words right out of him. He choked, and felt his throat tighten to stop a growling groan from getting through.

“Come on, Percy, I can’t heal you here. We have to get through the portal.”

She was standing up, hooking her hands under his arms to try to pull him to his feet. In his half-aware state, he grabbed onto her with one hand and tried to push off the wall with the other. But his head spun, and his foot slipped out from under him, and he slid back down, almost pulling Kima with him.

“Come _on_ …” 

She grabbed his arm and pulled him again, this time trying to drag him across the floor. The sudden jostling sent a fiery tear through his midsection, and he recoiled with a loud, mangled yelp. Percy cried out for her to stop. Was she insane? He couldn’t move. He couldn’t _move_. His limbs curled protectively into his body to block her out.

He could hear the sound of her breath growing faster. Kima looked over her shoulder toward the doorway, then back to Percy.

“There are more coming,” she said to him. “We have to go now.” She put her hands on his face and lifted his head straight from where it had lolled against one shoulder. He tried to focus his eyes on her, but something was stopping him. He was muttering without knowing what he was saying. She pressed her palms against the sides of his head and tilted his jaw up to meet her gaze. “Shh, shh… Percy, listen to me. We have to go now… This is it, buddy. Twenty steps and we’re home.”

In the frantic, dispersing frame of his consciousness, that last word caught him like a fish on a hook. Percy reached out with his last bit of sense and grabbed onto it, pleadingly. The pain returned with the force of a freight train as Kima began to pull him up again, but he stopped himself from resisting. He struggled to get his feet beneath him. They gave way, then his control returned, and he fell again, but Kima had him by the arm. He had a vague awareness of footsteps and voices looming out of the room. He was half-crouching, leaning heavily into Kima, but they were moving. He couldn’t see where they were going—his vision was intermittent, darkening, then lightening, and sideways. Was he back on the ground—? No, he didn’t think so. The rhythmic searing pain counted the steps forward for him with every motion.

Percy felt the movement cease and heard Kima’s harsh voice swearing in his ear.

“Fuck, no, not now…”

He felt a jostling as Kima fumbled to move with one of his arms slung over her shoulder. She was gripping his beltloop from the opposite side, doing most of the work of keeping him upright. Shapes were appearing across the room, cloaked figures like black ghosts.

“Get the—the—”

Percy felt one hand over his chest in search of the holster, unaware of how far he was from actually grabbing anything. Amazingly, Kima understood him and seized one of the two guns stowed against his torso. She fired it twice, then heard the click that signaled the empty chamber. But it was enough to get the tear gas going again on the opposite side of the room. As the coughing and hacking began, Kima threw down the gun and turned them both around, and started half-dragging him in the opposite direction. The gas began to flood into their space. Kima began to cough, fighting the urge to stop where she was going. Percy had no such control, and his coughing started despite the stabbing agony that followed, and he began to choke on something pooling in his throat.

Then they stopped. Consciousness was escaping him. His mouth was full of blood. He didn’t know if he was sobbing, or howling, or silent. But he felt the shock ripple through his insides as Kima’s hand gripped the dagger, hesitated, and yanked it free. Before he could react, he felt one of her hands on his back, and one pressed against the wound, and she pushed him forward.

A new feeling came over him. Even with the pain, he felt a new sort of spinning—a real spinning, not just in his head—and he might have been upside-down, or not, he didn’t know. A bright light flared up behind his clenched eyelids. His insides threatened to split in two, or maybe they had. Kima’s hand was still on him as they plummeted, and she was speaking, but she wasn’t talking to him. She was muttering some words he didn’t understand, but recognized them as something old, something foreign, something familiar, something _arcane_ —

And a warmth flooded through him like he’d never felt in all his life, even though he knew he had. The pain in his gut went from wrenching to piercing, and then to stinging. They hit the ground with a heavy thud that almost knocked him out again. Percy’s vision clarified. They were somewhere else. And there was Kima, lying beside him, the collar of his shirt grasped in one fist. In the other, she was clutching her holy symbol.

“Gotcha,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (thanks for reading!)


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The following 7,000 words were brought to you by... quarantine on a Friday night! Time and social spaces are an illusion! Why not spend your time reading fan fiction? It's like TV, but more indulgent.
> 
> Content warnings: canonically-appropriate violence.

Chapter 11

He didn’t have time to thank her. In the instant Percy realized what had happened, he also became aware of the commotion playing out around them. Percy and Kima picked their faces up off the ground to behold a bloodbath of the extraordinary variety.

They were at the bottom of some kind of cavern. The walls looked to be made of natural stone that stretched upward into perpetual darkness. The vast space around them was littered with fresh corpses and bits of destroyed skeleton. A flash of blue light exploded nearby, just out of sight, and more bone fragments rained down from above with a sound like scattering twigs and pebbles on pavement.

Someone was laughing. It was a familiar laugh—boisterous and steeped in a seething rage. Percy turned his head to see an arc of blood fly off the blade of an axe wielded by an enormous bearded goliath. That was all he had time to take in. Percy had barely sat himself up before his vision swarmed with red and green.

“Percy!” His barely-healed wound throbbed as Keyleth skidded to a halt on her knees and threw her arms around him. “You’re here! You look really terrible—ooh, I like your haircut, though. It’s got this, like, kind of streamlined look, ya know—?”

“What’s the status?” Kima demanded. She was already back on her feet, wiping her bloodied lip on the back of her arm. “We have to close that portal before they bring Delilah through—”

“Yeah, we already kn—”

“—so she can raise half a million undead—”

“Yeah, we know all of that!” Keyleth interrupted. “They’re working on it—we were just waiting for you two to show up!” 

Keyleth pointed over to the side, where two individuals stood on a dais of elevated stone: a small, purple-clad gnome and a human woman dressed in blue. They were both bent over a book—or rather, Allura was bent over the book. But since Allura was also encased in a translucent sphere of arcane energy, she seemed to be doing the reading while Scanlan pressed his hands and face up to the dome and shouted instructions back and forth with her. From this distance, Percy couldn’t tell what they were saying. He watched Scanlan duck out of the way as a crossbow bolt flew past him and pinged harmlessly off the bubble.

“You all right?” Kima said to Percy on the ground. 

Percy barely had time to respond, “I’m fine” before she’d run off in the direction of her wife, cutting her way through the remaining cultists and vaulting over the bodies that had fallen.

With Kima gone, Keyleth returned her attention to Percy, who was still clutching the bloody hole in his kevlar vest. She put her hands on top of his and cast a spell. He felt the stab wound heal and the stinging alleviate, just a bit more.

“Sorry,” she said, looking a little embarrassed, “I’m pretty tapped.”

“I’m fine,” Percy insisted again. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you. Where are my children?”

“They’re safe. We sent them off with Syldor until we get back. Don’t worry,” she added at his wary look, “Trinket is with them.”

Percy had reservations about those choices, but he was too eminently relieved to press that line of questioning. “How long has it been?”

“Since you disappeared? About five months.”

“Oh, good,” he said.

“Good?” Keyleth repeated incredulously.

“I was worried that the timing might have gotten a little weird. Weirder. But listen, where’s—”

Two noises occurred almost simultaneously. First, a growl came up right behind him, seemingly from nowhere. Percy recognized the sound of a reanimated, half-rotted corpse, but before he had time to figure out whether he had any weapons on him, and before Keyleth had time to pick up her staff and bash it, the second sound happened—the quick _fwip!_ of an arrow passing just beyond his ear, so close that he felt the rush of air tickle his cheek as it blew harmlessly past him. The arrow sunk into the eye socket of the zombie and knocked it backwards, where it hit the dirt and lay unmoving.

Percy and Keyleth both turned in the direction where the arrow came from. And there, hovering on her broom about sixty feet away, Fenthris knocked back for a second shot, was Vex. 

If Percy had dared to dream up any expectations for how they might reunite, it didn’t include her looking at him as she did now, but it didn’t matter. He was so profoundly, exquisitely thrilled to see her—whole and healthy, shining in her white scale armor—that her scowl didn’t trouble him at all. He didn’t even care that she had trained her next arrow directly at his face.

“Watch yourself, Keyleth,” Vex shouted from across the cavern, shifting her aim and loosing another arrow in their direction. A cluster of zombies had appeared from the darkness of the cave and were stumbling over to where Percy and Keyleth still knelt. “They could be imposters like Delilah.”

“Oh come on, Vex, look!” Keyleth wiped some of the blood from Percy’s chin with her sleeve, as if that would clear things up. “It’s totally Percy!” She took him by the arms and helped to sit him up straight. “He’s just a little bit—hey, hang on.” She gave his upper arms another squeeze. “You been workin’ out? You’ve got a little more muscle than I—”

“Keyleth—” he began helplessly.

“Hey! Percy!” Grog’s voice boomed out in an echo through the cavern. He had one arm deep in the bag of holding, and when he pulled it out, he came up with Animus. “Catch!”

Before Percy could tell him not to, Grog lobbed the gun. The tremendously delicate instrument soared across the open space, over a dozen undead, almost conking one in the skull. 

Despite the injury that threatened to rupture, and the blood loss that still had his vision fuzzy at the edges, Percy lunged out with one hand and snatched the gun out of the air. He leveled his arm and fired. With an explosive bang that rocked the cavern, the bullet passed through one, then two, then three zombie heads in a neat line. All three exploded in a spray of rotted viscera and bone.

“See, Vex?” Keyleth said in exasperation, gesturing once more to Percy, who was determinedly checking the gun instead of looking at his wife. He heard Vex’s annoyed sigh before she flew off to help Pike clear out a hoard. Keyleth patted him on the back as they stood up. “Don’t worry, Percy, she’ll come around.”

“She’s got it right. We could be imitations from the Earthen plane. You really ought to be more suspicious.”

“No I shouldn’t.”

“Bless you,” said Percy, popping the gun’s chamber back into place with a satisfying click. “Any if you don’t mind, keep close. Grog didn’t throw me any ammunition, and there’s only one shot left in here. All I’ve got otherwise is this bloody dagger that Kima pulled out of my stomach.”

Keyleth lit up her hands and smiled at him. “Save your shot in case Delilah makes an appearance.”

Evidently, the rest of Vox Machina had been hard at work undermining the Vecna followers’ plans for weeks, and all of it had culminated with a fight that started long before Percy and Kima showed up. The group made short work of what few cultists hadn’t fled for their lives, and once the last of the necromancers had either died or run off, the dead stopped coming back for them, too. Percy was deep into his second wind now, busy wrangling one of the last undead when Scanlan called out from the top of the dais:

“Less than two minutes left on the counter-ritual! No one do anything stupid!”

There was a metallic clang. Percy turned around and saw, with a sinking feeling, that Kima had dropped her sword. She was staring at the portal arch from forty feet away. For a split second, she glanced at Percy’s direction, as if not expecting him to be watching at her—and when their eyes met, it wasn’t Kima looking back at him. She took off towards the portal without a word or warning.

“Kima, stop!” he yelled, but she ignored him. 

Percy ran at a full sprint to intercept her, but he knew he wouldn’t make it. The only person between her and the other plane of existence was Grog, who had been waiting a few meters beyond the portal to greet the visitors that came through—so far, a handful of cultists from the ruins on the island. There had been no sign of Delilah, or Helen; it was possible that she was still locked in her cell with the keys.

“Grog, grab Kima!” Percy hollered.

Grog looked over his shoulder at Percy, confused. “Whuh—?”

“Grab her, Grog!”

The words seemed to click just as Kima was reaching him. Still looking nonplussed, Grog made a halfhearted attempt to snatch her. She dodged his right hand. He made a second grab, and she dodged again. Then it was just open space between her and the archway. The others had heard him yelling, but were either too dumbfounded to do anything about it, or didn’t have the spells left to try. With no time to explain, and no other ideas, Percy raised his arm and fired the last shot from Animus.

He knew it was a good shot before it hit—too good. He watched with a grimace as the bullet caught her in the back of the knee and burst out the front, destroying her kneecap. 

“Goddamn it.” Percy tossed the gun aside and ran after her.

She was screaming before she hit the ground. Her momentum sent her skidding. Over on the dais, Allura’s head perked up from her book at the sound. The glowing runes around her flickered momentarily as her concentration wavered.

Even with her leg in ruins, Kima was still trying to drag her body the last few feet. Percy had to jump on her to stop her, mere inches from the portal, and when he did, she began to swing and claw at him.

“You have to let me go! Let me go! God fucking damn it, stop!”

They tussled on the ground, Kima—Katie—screaming herself hoarse as she tried to break free. Her limbs were a blur of movement aimed in his direction. Percy took the hits, singularly focused on stopping her until it didn’t matter anymore. 

She pushed him off of her and he somehow got back on top. The broken pebbles and chunks of rock on the floor cut into his knees and palms and forearms. Blood from the gunshot had puddled from the wound, and in the struggle they got it everywhere; it made her wrists slippery and all the harder to grasp, smeared across their necks and faces, seeped into the fabric of his clothes. In the background, he heard the others hollering at him, but their voices all mixed together into nonsense, like the barking of a dog. Someone made a feeble effort to grab him. He swatted them off. He had her restrained by then, struggling to hold her fists in mid-air while he pinned down her undamaged leg with his knee. 

Both of them heard the hum of a ritual rising to completion. They froze mid-squabble, turning in unison to look at the portal as the fog within began to swirl. With their proximity to it, Percy could feel a faint movement in the air, like a breeze across his head. There was a subtle pull to it, magnetic, as if the portal were trying to draw them in. Kima’s body tensed as she felt it, too. Katie made another attempt to kick him off, but he held her fast.

“No…” Now frantic, she looked back up at Percy, and seemed to melt. Her arms went limp in his grasp as she began to sob. “Y-you can’t! Freddy, you have to let me go!”

A pulse of adrenaline-fueled dread surged through him. Percy hadn’t taken Kima’s concerns seriously, hadn’t actually believed that this could happen. The notion that Katie would cease to exist when they crossed the portal was something he’d accepted as unfortunate but unavoidable—there was nothing they could do about it on a plane without magic. He certainly never entertained the idea of leaving Kima behind. But Katie wasn’t supposed to be _here_.

Percy racked his brain for an idea. This was not his area of expertise—the boundaries of magic eluded him enough when he wasn’t half-dead and running at a mental sprint. But he didn’t have the luxury of time.

Just when he was about to concede that the situation was out of his hands, he had a thought.

“Pike!” he yelled, too busy struggling to look around. “Pike, I need you! Quickly!”

“What’s she saying?”

It was Keyleth. Percy suddenly became aware that Katie was pleading with him in English, and that most of the group had circled around them—except for Scanlan on the dais with his book, and Allura, who only now was jogging over from her ritual space.

“What’s going on here?” said Allura, aghast at the site of Kima’s sobbing form pinned beneath Percy, her clothes soaked with blood from her shattered knee.

“She’s—it’s not—we don’t have time to—”

“Explain quickly,” said Vex, drawing back an arrow and aiming it at his back.

“She—” Percy struggled to find the quickest explanation. “She’s sort of—possessed, but I think we can—Pike!”

Pike had appeared on his opposite side, by Kima’s head. She looked as disturbed as the others at the ongoing display, as Katie continued to plead with him in a language no one else could understand. He wasn’t even sure why he still knew it.

“You need to cast a restoration spell, before the portal closes—” 

Pike made a hesitant forward motion.

“Pike, wait, we don’t know—” Vex began.

“Shoot me if you want,” Percy said, whipping back around to Vex. He locked eyes with her, his heart hammering with adrenaline and fear and a slew of other emotions he wasn’t prepared to confront. “Restore her first, is all I ask.”

For several long, tense seconds, they regarded one another in silence. Then, slowly, Vex moved her target from his back to his knee. Without looking away from him, she addressed Pike on his opposite side.

“If that really is Kima’s body, will it hurt her?”

“It shouldn’t,” said Pike.

Allura had her mouth covered with her hands. “It shouldn’t, or it won’t?” she said.

“It won’t,” Pike said, with more confidence.

Percy nodded at her. Katie began to weep even harder at the sound of Pike’s armored footsteps. Percy let go of her wrists. Instead of trying to free herself, she grabbed uselessly at the front of his vest. When her fingers just slid off, she reached for his hands instead. He let her do it.

Pike knelt down by Kima’s side, opposite the portal. The last of the haze was spinning in towards the center of the arch now, drawing into a sphere of concentrated light and fog. They might only have seconds left.

“Don’t destroy it,” Percy cautioned, low enough for only Pike to hear. She gave him a quizzical look. “You’ll see. Just let it go.”

Grasping her holy symbol, Pike stretched one arm out and rested her palm on Kima’s forehead. The party watched, transfixed, as Pike closed her eyes at the start of the spell. Her face at first was calm, neutral, serene. Then her brow furrowed and she edged backward in surprise. The crying suddenly stopped as Kima’s body went still and rigid. Percy had her hands, their fingers locked together. 

Pike doubled down. She leaned back in like she was pushing Kima away, but gently. Raising her symbol up between them, Pike breathed in a long, slow, breath, and when she let it back out—

Kima’s head began to lift as smoke curled out from her ears, her eyes, her pores. Percy was vaguely reminded of Orthax, but this was different—the smoke was pale, almost translucent, shifting between shades of grey and gold. With her eyes closed, Pike couldn’t see it, but he knew that she could sense it. Her fist clenched out in front of her chest, and the apparition-like substance seemed to collect and curl around it. Pike’s chin tilted, her brow softened. Slowly, she let her fingers open. 

In an instant, the concentrated smoke flew from Pike’s grasp and straight towards the archway. It almost seemed to leap across the gap, over Kima’s prone form, and through the portal. There was no sound beyond the arcane hum of the already-gathering light and fog. It was there, and then it was gone.

Mere seconds later, the counter-ritual reached its crescendo. Without ceremony, the sphere that had gathered in the center of the portal gate blinked out of existence, leaving bare, unremarkable stone. Not a second too soon. Percy hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until he finally let it out. Kima’s hands slackened in Percy’s, but he didn’t let go.

A beat passed. Pike shook her head as she snapped out of her trance.

“That was a new one,” she said.

Percy shook his head in disbelief. “Pike… you are… beyond divine.”

Trying and failing to suppress a sheepish smile, Pike rested her hand on Kima’s knee. She uttered a few words, and the bleeding stopped. The bones mended before their eyes, the smattering of scratches on her face and neck slowly faded into the tone of her skin. Percy knew the others were staring, but he didn’t acknowledge them—he was fixed on Kima, watching intently as her breathing sped up and then slowed again. An eternity seemed to pass in the center of the group.

Percy felt a squeeze. Kima’s eyes fluttered open and began to scan the faces. She stopped when she found his. The look of bewilderment faded into relief.

“Well… I didn’t stab you,” she said to him in common.

Percy answered, with a quiet laugh, “And I didn’t push you through the portal. So it seems everything is in order.”

“Guess so…”

Rolling back onto his feet with a slight stumble, Percy helped Kima stand up again. She hesitated to put weight on the leg he’d shot, but once she did, she found it healed as good as new. Kima gave Pike’s shoulder an appreciative pat before she walked past all of them and straight into Allura’s arms. Allura’s face was wet with tears, and once she finally pulled back from the hug, Kima wiped them away on her dirty sleeve.

“Are you all right?” Allura asked.

“I will be once you kiss me,” said Kima.

“Oh, very well…”

They kissed, and by the time they broke apart, new tears had replaced the old ones. But Allura was smiling.

“Are you _sure_ you’re all right?”

Kima kissed her again. “Yeah. Just great.”

Keyleth bumped Percy with her shoulder in a way that made him think of Vax. “Hey Pike, got any more of those greater restorations so we can make sure this isn’t an imposter that looks and talks _just like Percy_?”

“Um, no,” Pike admitted, looking guilty. “But I could give you a regular old second opinion, I suppose… Percy—or, ah, Percy's lookalike—if you wouldn’t mind?”

“Of course.”

Without hesitation, Percy dropped to his knees and sat back on his heels for Pike to inspect him, hands folded obligingly in his lap. Pike walked around him in a slow circle. Occasionally she prodded him to make a show of her inspection. He had an acute sense of Vex standing just out of sight. At last glance, he’d seen her bow hanging down at her side; he took comfort in that.

“Well for starters, his hair is a little different,” Pike observed.

“Different styles over there,” Percy said, keeping his tone casual. “But hair needs cutting on any plane.”

“Isn’t he kind of—” Keyleth made a flexing gesture to prove her point.

“Maybe,” Pike agreed. She gave his bicep a squeeze. “He was pretty strong before, wasn’t he?”

“Generous, but I’ll take it,” Percy said.

“Not as strong as me, though,” Pike said, with a false sort of sternness.

“Certainly not.”

“And he did say that I was divine…”

“ _Beyond_ divine, is what I said.”

Pike stood right in front of him now, her armor clanging as her movement halted. She studied his face, lifted his chin with one hand, patted his cheek, and smirked.

“Now I can’t say this _for sure_ ,” she said facetiously. “But… I think it’s him.”

Grog stepped in before the others could react. “Wait, let me try.”

Percy winced as Grog grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back upright. He took out his axe and leveled it at the base of Percy’s throat. “You get one shot. Prove you’re Percival Fredericksssfucks whateva-whateva.”

Percy held out a hand, palm up.

“What’s that?” said Grog, looking at Percy’s bare hand as if expecting something to materialize.

“Give me my glasses,” said Percy. “The ones Tary made for me, not the old ones.”

Grog grunted, and sneered, “I don’t have your glasses.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that you have one, if not all, of my guns, but you don’t also have my glasses?”

There was a pause before Grog lowered the axe. “What you got for trade?”

“These, of course.” Percy took off the plastic frames that he’d first picked up in the hospital.

“Ooh,” Keyleth piped up from the side. “Inter-planar glasses! That sounds like a one-of-a-kind trade, Grog.”

“Literally one-of-a-kind, if you consider that the material used to make them doesn’t exist in our world.”

The deal proved too tempting to pass on. Grog walked off with his new item, leaving Percy to clean the crusty substance that had gotten caked on his old glasses during Grog’s tenure over them. He had just put them back on, thrilled to find the lenses miraculously unscratched, when Allura got their attention again. 

“Are we ready to head out?” she asked, having resurfaced at last from her reunion. Her face had gone a little pink, but her expression was unabashed. She looked borderline jovial, which, for Allura, was significant. “I have just enough of my reserves to get us back to Whitestone.”

Having nothing else to accomplish here, and with all the corpses freshly looted, the party circled up around Allura. As she prepared herself to cast the spell, Scanlan commanded the rest of their attention with a limerick about one of the cult leaders they had dealt with before Kima and Percy arrived. With half the group in stitches, Percy used the chance to sneak his first good look at Vex. 

She was standing a few feet to his side, with Pike between them, either by coincidence or design. Her posture seemed heavy with the broom slung over one shoulder, but compared to the rest, she had hardly a scratch on her. Percy was filthy by contrast. Vex wasn’t laughing like the others, but she was smiling at Scanlan in a tired, amused way. He thought of the hint she’d dropped him in the back yard of the inn, on the day that he disappeared. Feeling bizarrely guilty about it, let his gaze sneak down from her face to her midriff. The enchanted armor fit her form comfortably, but there was an unmistakable bump beneath the layers of leather and white scales.

So she had been right, and he had been gone. That sense of loss crept back in; Percy couldn’t possibly begin to know all the things that he had missed, and yet, he lamented each one already. An anxiousness rattled the bars of his chest.

He was still looking at her when the spell kicked in and plunged them into liminal space. Percy let it go, let the pull of the magic wash over, never more grateful for it than he was today. 

Within moments, that sense of movement had stopped, and he was taking his first deep breath of frigid Whitestone air. He had forgotten how clean and clear it was. Without the smog and the cars and the sewers, he could almost smell the frost beneath the faint smokiness of chimney fire.

They had appeared in a flurry of wind at the base of the castle’s main entrance. The dusting of snow on the steps blew up and around them as the last effects of the spell faded. Percy looked out over his city. From this vantage point, he could see the sporadic dots of orange that signified lamplight in the windows and rooms of homes. A few blocks off, the patrons at a pub were cheering and singing and clanking their tankards; the sound of their celebration told him that whatever hour it was, it was a late one. 

The sprawl of simple stone-and-wood homes was untouched, unchanged. Save for the weather, he could have left it yesterday. 

“Oy!” A voice from the parapet above cut through the perfect stillness. They all looked up to see a half dozen rifles trained in their direction. “Name yourselves and your business!”

“It’s just us, Kynan,” Vex shouted back at him. 

“Lady Vex’ahlia! Of—of course.” There was a scrambling sound as the rifles disappeared from sight, and Kynan’s face replaced them, apologetic. “I’m under instruction from Lady Cassandra to fetch her as soon as you return. Let me go and—”

But one of the heavy castle doors had already creaked open. Out from behind it came a woman wearing boots, a coat thrown over her nightgown. She didn’t seem to notice the cold, though her breath rose up in a thick cloud as she hurried to meet them.

Percy didn’t give her a chance to get there. Bounding up the steps two at a time, he met her halfway and skidded on his heels in the snow to throw his arms around her.

“Percival!”

The tone of her voice told him everything he needed to know about his absence. He lifted Cassandra into the air and spun her around in a circle, without regret for the searing pain that tore through his stomach.

“Dear sister, never leave me again!”

 _“Me?_ _”_ came the disbelieving squeak in response. 

Percy set Cassandra back on her feet, then took her face in his hands and kissed one cheek, then the other, and then her forehead. Her hair was a wild tangle. She brushed it away from her face in an attempt at composure, which was somewhat lost by the rest of her attire.

“Hang on, hang on, let me look at you properly…” She held him out at arm’s length to take in his appearance. “Yes, I suppose it is you, isn’t it? They haven’t sent a doppelganger from another plane?”

“Don’t be too disappointed. I assure you that if such a doppelganger did exist, he would have been just as much of a nuisance to you.”

“Hah,” said Cassandra, with equal dryness. “You’ve no idea the kind of nonsense we’ve put up with in your absence. The council and all—but never mind that. You must tell me everything that’s happened. And, oh, what about—? Ah, Lady Kima!” She spotted Kima lurking in the back of the crowd and offered a nod of acknowledgement. Kima raised her hand in a stiff half-wave. “I’m glad to see you safely returned as well. Why don’t we all head to my study? I’ll have food and drinks brought up, and we can speak more privately…”

Cassandra started back up towards the door, towing Percy behind her by the hand.

“Er, Allura,” he said, craning over his shoulder to address her, “is there any chance you could send word to Syngorn?”

Allura gave Vex a sidelong glance that she no doubt intended to be covert, and which Vex met with a sternly raised eyebrow. “I’m afraid I can’t tonight. But I’ll send word first thing in the morning, as soon as I’ve had a rest.”

“The children will be asleep now anyway,” Cassandra cut in, before Percy could speak. “And besides, brother, you should wash up before they arrive. They aren’t used to seeing you covered in blood like the rest of us are. It’ll give them nightmares.”

He shook off the disappointment while Cassandra led them up the familiar route to her study, where they all piled in around the blazing hearth and helped themselves to the food and drink that arrived shortly after. Percy couldn’t eat. His stomach was writhing so badly he feared he wouldn’t be able to keep anything down. Without the hope of seeing his children tonight, his mind fell right back to Vex. He doubted Allura was lying about not being able to get a message out, but it seemed clear that Vex still had her reservations. Not that he blamed her.

But there was something beyond wretched about being both so close and so far from her now, after everything. All Percy wanted in the entire universe was a few minutes to speak with her alone. Neither the universe nor Vex seemed to share his aspirations just then, however. As they were settling into the chairs and other seats in the room, Percy spotted her slipping back out the door and into the hallway. With a glance to see that no one was watching him—the others being distracted by Grog, who had pulled the dripping, severed head of a hobgoblin out of the bag of holding—Percy ducked through the door after her, easing it shut behind him.

“Vex!” he called out, as softly as he could.

She was halfway down the corridor by then, but to his surprise, she stopped. Very slowly, she turned around.

“Oh. Hello…” she said, in poorly-feigned surprise at the sight of him standing there.

Percy started to move forward, but stopped himself.

“How are you?” he blurted.

He regretted the question immediately, but then, there was nothing else he could have asked, because nothing else was on his mind. Vex took a few cautious steps in his direction. Percy could see her uncertainty, try as she did to hide it.

“I need to get this armor off. It’s rather heavy, and I’m—” she faltered. “I’m just so _tired_.”

The apologetic tone of her voice almost broke him. Neither of them moved. Up close, Vex had a tenseness in her jaw that he couldn’t see before. Her face was too grim, too gaunt, the color drained from it. The circles beneath her eyes made him recall seeing his reflection in the handheld mirror at the barbershop after his first haircut. The same though crossed his mind now as it did then: there was no mistaking the person, but the person was not well.

Percy wanted to reach out to her so badly that the thought was making him sick. It was like being in those early stages of love again, before he had an inkling about how she felt, when he’d pined after her in a pathetic silence and forced himself to think of all the reasons it didn’t make sense to hope. Except now, he left the space between them not because he didn’t trust himself, but because she didn’t invite him in. He resolved not to budge until she did.

Percy’s hands were shaking, so he put them in his pockets. “We should talk,” he said. “Not—not tonight, necessarily, but…”

Vex started her retreat, stepping backwards once, and again. “I’ll come right back,” she assured him, looking almost pained. “It’ll just be a few minutes.”

“Sure,” he said, nodding too much. 

And with that, Vex left Percy standing alone in the hallway. He listened until the sound of her boots had faded, and for some time afterward. Once he could convince himself to move, he let himself back into Cassandra’s study, opening the door as quietly as possible. 

He meant to sneak back inside and act as if he’d never left. So, naturally, everyone was staring at him when he re-entered the room.

“That was a quick one,” said Grog. 

Percy fixed Grog with a blank stare and closed the door with a little more force than necessary. 

“Now, now, there’s no need to be embarrassed,” Scanlan chimed in. “Greater men than you have lasted half as long the first time after months apart. A dry spell does that to a man.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you?” said Percy. “I have a gift for you, by the way.”

“For me?” Scanlan said, taken aback.

Percy withdrew his hand from his pocket, and with it came the iPod, the headphones still wound neatly around it. He tossed it across to Scanlan, who nearly missed the catch out of surprise.

“Come back and see me when it stops working; I should have a charger sorted out by then.”

“What is it?” Scanlan asked, turning the music player over in his hands.

“You’re a greater man than me—you’ll figure it out.”

Across the room, Kima looked on with disapproval while Scanlan unspooled the white headphone cables from around the iPod. Allura cleared her throat. 

“We were just telling Kima how we came to learn about the gate.”

“I’ve been curious about that,” said Percy, already heading over to where Cassandra was patting the empty space next to her on the chaise longue, her favorite reading seat. “Were you able to learn how they identified the plane of existence with Delilah’s alternate?”

“We’ve had several theories, but it’s likely one of two…”

In short order, the party members had indulged their fill of food and drinks. Grog had poured Percy a cup of ale from the cask as well, which for the most part just sat in his hand. Allura and Keyleth were deep into an explanation of how Vecna’s followers had forced their way into the magic-resistant plane, with the others cutting in to fill in details or derail the conversation. That was why, when Vex slipped into the chamber and took a seat on Cassandra’s desk by the far wall, Percy was the only one to notice.

The armor was gone. In his periphery, he could see that she had bathed and dressed in casual linens, her long hair pulled over one shoulder, still damp. In these clothes, her pregnancy was more obvious—not as much as it had been with Vesper by this far along, or the twins, but still plainly there. It took all of his willpower not to look at her directly.

Luckily, Keyleth chose that moment to ask, “What was that place like, anyway? Was it like the hells, or more, like ethereal?”

“The clothes are certainly strange,” Cassandra said. 

She touched the stretchy spandex of Percy’s sleeve, which was crusted with dried blood. He had taken off the vest on entering the study, and now he passed it around so the others could take turns feeling it and inspecting the different pieces. There was a hole to the left of center on the lower half, where the blade had caught him between two protective plates.

Percy contemplated for a moment. “The place where we landed was a city, but not quite like anything on this plane. I think of it as sort of a dirty, hyper-modernized version of the feywild, with buildings in the place of trees.”

“It was definitely different,” Kima agreed. “But it was so different that it’s hard to describe. Oh, actually—”

The backpack that Kima had worn through the gate lay on the ground by her chair. She pulled it into her lap, unzipped it, and withdrew a printed photograph.

“Is that what I think it is?” asked Percy.

He leaned over to accept the photo from Kima, and couldn’t help but notice the strange feeling that came over him at the sight of his own image printed in ink. There he was, standing at the top of the church tower in his Earthen coat and scarf, looking tired but bemused at the photographer (who, if Percy recalled correctly, had just told him about strangers paying for questionable pictures). Stretched across the background, the whole of Manhattan stood on proud display.

“What a detailed painting,” said Cassandra from beside him, leaning in for a closer look. “What are those shapes behind you?

“It’s not a painting, but I’m too tired to explain the evolution of photography and the laser printer right now. And those are all towers,” he said, pointing them out. “There are dozens of them within a span of a few miles. Some of them over a thousand feet tall, all made without magic.”

Keyleth made a beckoning motion. “Let me see!”

“That scale of construction without magic is… unprecedented,” said Allura, trying to catch a glimpse of the photo as Percy handed it across to Keyleth.

“Towers aren’t the half of it. This plane has technology beyond what any of us could comprehend, but so ordinary for the people that they don’t even notice it. They’ve cured diseases, and traveled to their moon, and learned how to communicate through the air, all without magic.”

“Sounds like your kind of place,” said Pike, from over where she had been watching Scanlan sniff one of the earbuds.

“It was... let’s just say it was a different perspective,” he said, with a knowing look toward Kima. “But ultimately not my preferred one.”

“The food was really good,” said Kima.

“Yes, whatever shall you do without your bagels?” Percy quipped.

“Funny you should say that.”

“You didn’t… good god, you did.” She had reached into her pack once more and pulled out a clear plastic bag filled with a dozen bagels. Percy clapped a hand to his forehead. “You had one small backpack’s worth of space for souvenirs from another plane of existence, and you chose to fill it with bagels.”

“Don’t backpack shame me,” Kima said hotly. “Not all of us are interested in bringing back power drills.”

“I’m surprised you noticed it missing from the closet. The condition of the apartment made it clear you never repaired anything.”

“How are _you_ going to use that thing, anyway? There are no outlets here.”

“I have some ideas,” Percy said. “I may have brought along a few knickknacks that could prove useful.”

Grog, not listening to the conversation, squinted with suspicion at the bag dangling from Kima’s hand. “What’s that?”

“Here you go, Grog. First one’s on the house.”

Kima untwisted the top and passed him one of the bagels, which looked about the size of a potato chip in the center of his giant palm. Grog touched it with his finger and stuck the finger to his tongue. Apparently he liked whatever flecks of garlic or poppy seed he’d managed to get with the first taste, because then he popped the entire bagel into his mouth.

“S’pretty good,” he said between chews. “Beats a bowl of rotten meat with, like, bones n’shit stabbing you from the inside.”

Kima patted him on his forearm because she couldn’t reach his shoulder. “Proud of you, Grog. Way to try new things.” She raised the bag. “Who else wants a taste of inter-planar breakfast?”

Keyleth helped herself to one from the bag, broke off a piece, and passed it along to Pike. Her face lit up as she ate her share. The bagel made its way around the room, with each of them tearing off a piece to try.

“You’re supposed to put different spreads and fillings in it,” Kima was explaining when Scanlan passed the last bit of it to Cassandra. “You can make it a sandwich, or toast it up with some butter… There’s different kinds of bagels, too. Some have fruit, some are more savory…”

Percy watched Cassandra take a nibble at her piece. She chewed thoughtfully, then swallowed it and said, just loud enough for Percy to hear, “So that’s what the mystical plane has to offer, is it?”

“Disappointing, I know,” he said, at the same hushed volume. 

“It’s not _too_ bad. It might be nice with... hmm... a soft cheese, and some smoked salmon, perhaps.”

Percy couldn’t quite suppress a laugh. The sound seemed to startle her. 

“What’s so funny?” she said.

Percy shook his head and grinned at her. “Nothing,” he said, wiping a stray crumb from her cheek. “I just missed you, is all.”

“I shall never understand you, brother,” she answered, as Percy pulled her into a one-armed hug. “You smell terrible, by the way. And you’re going to get more blood on my clothes.”

Even as Cassandra complained, she rested her temple on his shoulder. Percy was still smiling when he let his attention wander, without his realizing or permission, back over to Vex. She had been watching him with that same searching look, and when their eyes met, he felt himself tense up. Like plunging back into the freezing water. Could that really have been just hours before?

Two seconds passed, and then four, though it felt like an eternity. 

Right when Percy had finally gained the nerve to look away, he saw a shift come across her body. The arms that had been crossed over her chest unwound and came down to grip the edges of the desk she was sitting on. Vex seemed to droop out of her guarded posture, just by an inch. And though he might have imagined it, he could have sworn that her expression softened into the slightest, most clandestine smile.

Percy indulged a moment longer under her gaze before he had to turn his head and blink. His eyes were burning, but that was just fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Katie: *wakes up in the hospital after yet another mysterious head injury* what the shit? *goes home to find the fridge empty, microwave and fridge water dispenser suddenly working properly, and a lot of expensive men's clothing hung in the coat closet* what the SHit??
> 
> ONE MORE CHAPTER TO GO!!!!! sorry for the accidental slow burn (??) brought to you by Vex'ahlia "can i make an insight check" de Rolo. Thanks for sticking with me this far!
> 
> Also, I worship the ground that Cassandra walks on.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE DID IT, SQUAD!!! WE MADE IT TO THE END!!!!!! Whew, this story took its sweet-ass time, didn't it? I kept thinking that it could have been half the length and still done the job, but.... sometimes I can't help but break out the magnifying glass and hone in on every fucking movement. Out of curiosity, I took a peek at the Perc'ahlia tag to see where I landed in terms of word count. Top ten babeyyyy lmao. I have no self control. 
> 
> I honestly don't know what I am going to do with myself now that this is finally done. It's pretty much been my every idle thought since October (sooooo... seven months??). Sounds lame-slash-dramatic but it's true. ahhhh fuck. I've had this last chapter queued up for days here, and kept going back in to make changes... eventually I had to convince myself that I was just stalling. Thursday is a thematically appropriate day to post, right? 
> 
> And also, because I don't want to clog up the end notes with my usual rambling, I wanted to say.... thank you ALL for reading along. Thank you for every kudos, and especially for every comment. Anyone who tells you that they don't care about commenting is lying to your face. Your support, encouragement, kindness, and observations are really everything. I can't tell you how much it's meant to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. 
> 
> Finally, the content warning: Sex! *throws confetti* If you are not into reading about sex, that's cool, just scroll on past that part. But this is a pairing that Fucks, and frankly they are in desperate need at this point. I pulled a few punches to keep us within the M rating, so it's more descriptive than graphic anyway.
> 
> Ok no more talking. Enjoy this last chapter (all 9,800 words of it because, again, self control). And as always, thanks for reading!

Chapter 12

The fire had burned down to cinders, and Cassandra was asleep on his shoulder. 

One by one, the rest of the party had passed out as well. Percy had taken some pleasure in watching them move through their conversations, slowly but surely heading further off topic until they left the day’s events entirely. The urgency of it was gone. Now they all lay scattered across the room amidst bits of armor and half-eaten plates of food, leaving Percy to preside over them. Even Vex had stolen over to join Keyleth on a pair of floor cushions and dozed off there, leaning back into the wall with Keyleth slumped against her.

All that left was Percy, altogether too sober and uneasy to rest. The stiffness and bruising from the longest day of his life had begun to set in, and he could feel the dried spatter on his neck when he scratched behind his ear. He didn’t know whether it was Kima’s, or his own, or possibly from the woman whose throat he’d cut open on the island. He kept thinking about their plan to get to the portal, and the way things had gone, playing it over in his mind as if there was room for improvement. It was a pointless exercise, he knew. His brain was just desperate for something to think about besides the uncertainties he couldn’t control. Kima didn’t seem to share his anxieties. She had been one of the first to fall asleep, lulled into unconsciousness by Allura running her fingers through her blood-caked hair. He’d have felt a little lonely looking at them, were it not for Cassandra’s weight pressing into his arm.

She mumbled something indistinct as Percy slipped off the chaise and picked her coat up from where it had fallen to the floor. He waited until she stopped moving to drape it over her like a blanket, and unconsciously, Cassandra tucked her feet up under it and settled into the warm space he’d left behind. Percy watched her for a few quiet moments, finding some peace in the rare calmness on his sister’s face.

When at last he made to creep out of the room in search of a bath, he chanced one last glance toward Vex, and was startled to see her climbing to her feet. Percy automatically moved towards her, arm extended in an offer of aid, but she was up before he got there. Like Cassandra, Keyleth grumbled and adjusted her space when her headrest abandoned her. Vex exhaled a long, silent sigh and rubbed her hands on the creases of her hips with a grimace. She didn’t say anything to him, but he followed suit when she gestured for them to leave the study and its sleeping inhabitants.

Outside the room, Percy spent an unnecessary amount of time closing the door in order to give Vex the chance to walk off without him. She surprised him by waiting there while he fiddled with the knob. They set off together down the corridor, side-by-side. She wasn’t leaving the kind of distance that she had been before. Her hand swung down next to his, close enough to grasp if he had the nerve for it. Percy had almost convinced himself to try when she drew her hands back in, ran them once over her stomach, and clasped them in front of her.

“When I think of all the strange places we’ve managed to sleep,” she said, “it seems silly that I can’t even sleep on the floor of my own home.”

After a moment, Percy responded, “The circumstances don’t seem a fair comparison.”

To get to the bath, he had to go down a stairway at the back of the castle. The path took him right past the bedchamber he shared with Vex, which put him in the position of having to decide whether or not to stop once they had reached the door. 

He did stop; the change in her body language had told him it was safe to do that much. Vex didn’t say anything as she gently budged the door open with her shoulder, but when it swung wide with a loud creak and she stepped inside, Percy couldn’t suppress his reaction:

“What on Earth?”

Even from the hallway, he could see their room draped in heavy black silks. The banners hung from the ceiling, the walls, the windowsills. Something had been spread across the floor in a path from the doorway to the bed on the other side of the room.

“Are those—?”

“Dead flowers,” Vex sighed resignedly. “We have our Grand Poohbah and the gnomes to thank… Scanlan said he wanted to decorate for the occasion, but at the time, he didn’t know what the outcome would be.”

“A funeralistic romance, or a romantic funeral,” said Percy, poking his head into the room for a better look. “A win-win by any measure.”

Vex actually smirked at that, sheepishly. Percy withdrew back into the hallway as if he hadn’t noticed.

“I’m going to wash up,” he said.

She pointed to the spot in his shirt where the knife had almost killed him. “I’d offer a cure wounds, but I’m fresh out. You haven't still got a hole in your gut, have you?”

Percy poked his fingers through the gap in his spandex to touch the wound that Kima had healed. She and Keyleth had reduced it to an inch-wide line above his pelvis, but the tissue below it felt tender to the touch. A few days would fix him up all right.

“I’m fine. And I only recently learned about hepatitis, so… I feel pretty good about that…” he trailed off.

Vex didn't press him for an explanation. “If I can get the dried flower bits off the bed, I’m going to lie down,” she said. “I’ll leave the latch undone, but make sure you lock it before you come to bed. I don’t need any more shenanigans for a few days.”

“Oh. Um…”

She raised an eyebrow at his tone. “Unless you planned to go back with the group—?”

“No…” he said. Which technically wasn’t a lie, since he’d intended to bed down in his workshop for the night, if it was still there and in serviceable condition. The blatant invitation had caught him off guard. “I’ll return shortly. But don’t feel the need to wait up for me… we can talk tomorrow.”

“All right,” Vex said. “Tomorrow, then.”

Percy escaped to the washroom, too dazed to come up with any intelligent addition to the conversation. With the hour being so late, he didn’t run into anyone on his way down the stairs, but when he let himself into one of the private baths, he found it waiting ready for him. A fog hung heavy in the air from steam rising off the enormous tub. He stuck his hand in it and found it scalding hot. Cassandra’s instructions, no doubt. He loved her more than ever.

Feeling a bit like a stranger in his own home, Percy took his time in cleaning up. He peeled his layers of clothing off and tossed them in a pile. Little flecks of dried blood came off and drifted to the floor as he undressed slowly, inspecting each newly-exposed part of his body for anything suspicious. He had worried that walking through the portal might have odd effects that he couldn’t anticipate—much like how going through in the opposite direction had just about changed everything but his physical person. 

Everything seemed to be in order. Percy was covered in bruises and scrapes in various stages of magically-accelerated healing under a layer of red splotches. In other words, the best he could have hoped for the situation.

The water burned against his wounds, but Percy took a couple of short, quick breaths and forced himself to sink in. After a few strained seconds, the initial shock of it subsided into a pleasant, albeit intense, warmth. He’d run the temperature gamut today, he thought to himself as he scrubbed a bar of soap into his hair. From just above freezing to just below boiling. By the time he was done, the water had turned cloudy and pink with suds. He took one final rinse with fresh water from a nearby basin, then dried off. A clean set of clothes waited for him as well. Percy pulled them on, noting the difference in the fabric’s texture from what he’d been wearing for the last few months.

He was on his way back, rubbing his head dry with a towel, when he came upon Cassandra en route to her own private chambers. With her boots in one hand and her coat over her shoulder, her exhaustion was nearly palpable in the way she moved. Yet, she still stopped when she saw him coming down the hallway.

“You look better,” she observed. “Do you feel better?”

“That remains to be seen,” said Percy, with a significant look past her in the direction of where Vex was likely sleeping.

Cassandra shook her head warily. “You’ve no idea how difficult this has been, Percival—for all of us, but especially for Vex’ahlia. You mustn’t be upset with her—”

“Upset?” he cut in. “With her? Are you mad?”

“No,” said Cassandra, a little put off by his sharpness. “I just meant that it must be difficult to finally come home and be greeted with suspicion.”

“Her reaction is the only comforting thing that’s happened since I crossed into this plane. I’ll admit I’m a bit shocked that everyone else has accepted us back so easily. If you all expected a brand new Delilah Briarwood to come skipping through the portal—” Cassandra flinched at the name, but Percy went on, “—it seems perfectly reasonable that imitations of Kima and myself might also appear, doesn’t it?”

“Yes and no… my understanding of it is that they sought that particular plane because she—Delilah—was there. That doesn’t mean that any of the rest of us would have a variation on the other side.”

“And a little suspicion would have served you well, is all.”

“Well I’m sorry that none of us took on your unique role of assuming the absolute worst outcome of every circumstance,” she said. “But it’s more complicated than that. She… there were other factors that made it even worse than you’d expect. Addressing it with the children was one thing, of course.”

Percy felt a pang, his irritation subsiding. “What did you tell them?”

“That… you had to go away for a while,” she said dully. “They’re resilient, but they’re not stupid. Julia’s too young to understand, but the others suspected, I think. They haven’t been their cheery selves. And Vex didn’t help in that regard.”

“What do you mean?”

“We did our best to soften things,” Cassandra added hastily. “But…Percival, she was just… It was difficult enough for me, with my own… complications. But I could hardly look at her at times.”

The wet towel draped across his shoulders felt uncommonly heavy all of a sudden. He squeezed it with his injured hand, apprehensive of the way Cassandra was avoiding his eyes.

“Why.”

“I think a part of it was just the shock. She woke up one morning, and you were gone. No note, no trace. Just your glasses on the bedside table. They couldn't scry on you, or send a message. I'm sure it made her think of her brother… On top of that, in case you haven’t noticed, she’s quite a ways along with…”

Cassandra made a vague gesture, and Percy looked away, grumbling, “I knew about that. From before.”

“Did you?” she said, surprised. Percy nodded. “Very well then. It was news to us. She didn’t tell anyone until she couldn’t hide it any longer—which was a lot more recently than it should have been. And she was sick as a dog. Sleeping all the time, not eating and the like. In hindsight it was quite obvious—just like with the twins, in the first few months, remember? And I couldn’t keep her out of the bloody Parchwood. Twice she and Trinket were gone for almost a week, and I had to send the Grey Hunt to look for her…”

“And?” Percy pressed.

“She was fine, obviously.”

“That’s not what I meant.” There was more. Percy could hear it in her voice.

“And… she thought it was her fault.”

Percy blinked. “What?”

“She thought the Raven Queen took you away. Something to do with a promise she made about Orcus.”

“That’s…” The thought had never occurred to him before, but now it struck him with such force that he was rendered momentarily speechless. “That’s… but you must have known that Kima was missing, too. How would that have anything to do with the Raven Queen?”

“She had a theory that Kima was related because she was there when you found a horn, or something. I don’t know the details.” Cassandra waved a dismissive hand. “But until we learned the truth, that was the best she had. The Raven Queen wasn’t entertaining questions about it, not for lack of trying. Honestly, the biggest relief for all of us was finding out that a band of litch-worshiping cultists were to blame.”

Percy didn’t say anything. He was still trying to process that thought, and the monumental impact it must have had on an already confusing and complicated situation.

“Everything worked out in the end,” she assured him. “Except at the moment, I don’t know what she wants.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Percy said. “Whatever it is, she’ll have it. If its space, then that’s fine. If not, then that’s fine, too.”

“And what do _you_ need, Percival?”

“I have everything I need now. Though…” he hesitated before admitting, “I would very much like to see my children."

Cassandra smiled and reached up to touch his shoulder. “Tomorrow, we’ll make it happen. You have my word.”

“Thank you, Cass.”

“You’re welcome.” Her hand was still on his arm, and she gave it a squeeze. “You look well, by the way. Considering.”

“You can thank Kima,” he said. “You should have seen me before she came along.”

Cassandra fixed him with a knowing look. “I’m glad she found you.”

“Me, too.”

“Oh, and here. You can have this back now—”

Cassandra fished into the top of her nightgown and came up with a pendant necklace that Percy recognized at once as one of Tary’s. He bowed so she could drape it over his head, the silver chain still warm when it settled against his neck.

With one last nod of approval, Cassandra withdrew to her room. “Get some sleep, brother.”

“Goodnight.”

The bedchamber was dark when Percy eased the door open and ducked inside, locking it behind him. If he strained his vision, he could just make out a shape on the far side of the bed. He still hadn’t figured out what he was supposed to do next. It seemed awfully soon to just climb right into bed with her, even though she had invited him there. 

It was _his_ bed, though. And he was married to the person sleeping in it. And she had _invited_ him there.

Still, leaving margin for error never hurt anyone. Percy had just decided to curl up on the cushioned chair instead—he’d been sleeping on a couch for months, anyway, so this was not much different—when he took a step away from the door, and his foot came down on a pile of dried up, blackened flower petals. Percy froze. The crunching might not have woken anyone else, but with Vex, he might as well have thrown a vase across the room.

Indeed, something was moving. There was a shuffling, and the unmistakable strike of flint, and the lantern at her bedside flickered to life.

“Sorry,” he hissed, squinting at the sudden light.

Vex shook her head in a sluggish dismissal of his apology. She pushed herself all the way until she was sitting upright in the bed, the blankets falling down in a pool around her. Percy watched as she rubbed her eyes, put her face in her hands, took a long, deep breath, and finally looked over at him.

“It’s… it really is you, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he breathed. “And if there is anything at all, on this plane or any other, that I could say or do to make you believe me, just say the word.”

“You don’t have to,” said Vex. “I believe you.”

Percy stood there, dumbstruck, and let the words wash over him. Had she really said it? He crossed the room and around to her side of the bed. He sat down on the edge, gripped his knees with his hands. He was about to turn and address her, or even just _look_ at her, but something stopped him. The nights in the city stole into his memory, and every separate second of doubt passed before him. Every dream that had filled him with longing and ended in devastation when he woke up. 

“Percy…” His name on her lips was enough to shock him out of his trance. Vex leaned in to study his profile. “What is it?”

At last, Percy found the willpower to face her. She was peering at him with visible concern.

“I’m so tired that I’m afraid I’m hallucinating, and you’re not really here.” Percy took in a shallow breath that came out as a light, soft laugh. And then he said, so quietly, “I’m afraid to touch you.”

Vex made a little sound, like a whimper, enough to break his heart.

“Oh, but darling… I wish you would.”

It was out of his control at that point, really.

Shunting the last threads of reservation aside with his fear, Percy reached out and pulled her into a hug. The force of it almost knocked them backwards. Vex at once began to sob. She wrapped her arms around him and clung on with no regard for his wounds. If they stung at the pressure, Percy didn’t notice. His hands were full of her hair, and the back of her shirt, and with his face buried in her neck, he couldn’t feel the tears dripping off his chin or the breath catching in his ribs. 

They stayed that way until the crying stopped. Maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour. Only once calm had returned to them did Percy climb into bed, on her side instead of his. Vex reached over him and blew out the lantern, and together they lay down, huddled close together atop the blankets. Silence returned to the room, meditative and dim. His thoughts raced with everything he wanted to ask, and everything he ought to say, but he was too tired to start. Vex seemed to share his sentiment; she sighed, scooting even further into his space like she was trying to absorb him. Percy couldn't keep it all at bay, though. 

“How are we supposed to come back from this?” Percy said, his voice thick.

Vex sniffled. “You and me?”

“No—no, just… everything.” Percy was still holding her, stroking her hair, terrified to let her go. “I want to believe that nothing has changed, but I know it can’t be true.”

“What, like the plane’s changed you?” said Vex. “Are you going to be all weird now, and put your faith in science and technology instead of magic and the gods, like some kind of heretic?” When he didn’t rise to the joke, Vex sighed. “It might take some time, but it’ll be all right. Our family is back together—how could it not be?”

Percy didn’t say anything. He just studied her face, in humble disbelief.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Vex whispered.

Percy tilted his head and kissed her, softly. He heard and felt the slightest gasp in response to his touch.

“Because I had to exist in a world without you in it, and it nearly killed me.” He kissed her again. “How was I meant to live without my heart?”

Vex had begun to shake, but it didn’t stop her from reaching for him in the dark. She cupped his face in her hands, kissed him back, and said, “I missed you, too. In every conceivable way.”

* * *

The exhaustion put him straight to sleep, but it couldn’t keep him there.

Percy was walking through a park full of strangers that wouldn’t meet his eye. Rain began to shower from beyond the reach of the surrounding skyscrapers, and a hundred black umbrellas popped up over a hundred heads. Then he was indoors. He was flicking through a notebook on the subway, the endless noise pressing into him like a pillow over the mouth and nose. The text looked foreign to him even though the handwriting was his own. Then he was kneeling on the tiled floor of an apartment, his right fist cradled to his chest, the muscles cramping.

A car horn screeched right next to his ear. Percy awoke with a jolt as his arms came up to shield his face from the impact.

What followed next was a two-part exercise in disorientation. 

First, he was back in his city apartment, curled up on the far end of an empty bed, utterly alone. Kima and Trevor and the portal and all the rest had poured from his imagination as he lay there, hot with a fever that had left him deaf—

—but no, his ears were still ringing. There was just no road noise, no honking, no voices carrying from below. It was perfectly silent, except for the thrum of his own pulse.

Afraid to look, Percy turned his head and strained his ears. To his left, almost too soft to notice, he heard the sound of breathing. He opened his eyes. At some point he had migrated across the bed, to his own side. Even in the dark, he saw Vex lying a foot away, still asleep with her back turned against him. That was when the second thought kicked in.

Could it be that this was the very same night he had slipped into bed beside her and told her everything was just perfect? Had the other plane and its marvels just spun from his subconscious? All a dream?

Percy hardly dared to give himself credit for that level of madness, but the thought occurred to him anyway. Without moving, he drew his mind’s attention to his hand. At first it felt normal, but when he squeezed his fingers to a fist, the ebbing pain returned to his knuckles and traveled up his wrist. It was a definite sign, but no guarantee. So he shifted across the center of the bed to where Vex slept on her side, and curled against the shape of her frame. With his left hand, he gently swept her hair away from her neck while the other found her belly.

Vex took a deep breath, not waking. As she let it go, her hand floated up to rest on his bicep. Percy waited. The faintest hint of blue light began to creep into the room as morning returned to Whitestone. She had left the window open a crack, as always, to let the cool air steal in and play across the curtains. She slept on, their chests rising and falling in tandem. 

Finally, he felt it. The smallest shift beneath his right hand, unmistakable despite the ache in his tendons. There was no imagining that. 

Pressing a kiss to the nape of her neck, Percy withdrew himself, and sat up. His body protested as he stood and stretched and sighed. The soreness and stiffness remained from last night, but it was not the worst he’d ever known. Honestly, he’d never felt better. 

Careful to avoid the trail of flower petals this time, Percy left the room and began to work his way down the hall—not aimlessly, but in no rush. It was early, and the castle’s inhabitants would be asleep for some hours, except for the cook; the hint of fresh bread baking had already begun to fill the air. The smell made him feel oddly nostalgic.

Percy paused in each of the three bedrooms on the route to his workshop. Julia’s was the closest. She had only just begun to sleep there when he had gone. He peeked in and found it almost exactly as he’d left it: a crib and comfortable chair with a blanket draped over one arm. The twins’ room had a vastly more chaotic energy—there were clothes thrown everywhere, along with Percival’s growing collection of rocks and stones. Percy peeked into the book that Keyleth had given him on plants, and found a few more leaves pressed between the pages. Illia’s signature half-finished glasses of water had all congregated on a table. Next to that was her toy broom, which she was convinced would fly if she figured out the right word. (She was right, but the word was “caution” in celestial, and Percy knew it might be years before she had learned that particular lesson.). Vesper’s room could have been his as a child—a windowsill covered in little trinkets, and books on every surface, including one he found beneath the pillow. He flipped through it absently and set it back on the bookcase before continuing along the corridor.

Someone had been in his workshop. By the state of it, a _lot_ of people had been in there. The room had been thoroughly turned, no doubt in search for clues about his whereabouts, and then left to collect dust. A few miscellaneous tools were missing (to be found in the same place as his weapons, if he had to hazard a guess), but the rolled-up blueprint from his clock tower still sat in its spot on the shelf. Percy unfurled the parchment and inspected it to remind himself where he’d left off. There were a few places in the design that bothered him now, seeing what he’d seen in the veritable mosaic of architecture. He hadn’t decided how to weigh that experience just yet. A part of him wanted to resist everything he had learned there, lest someone claim that his ideas weren’t really his own. But then, few ideas were pure originality anyway. Orthax was proof enough of that.

After he’d secured the lock on his workshop door, he made one last stop before heading back. Apparently no one had informed the early risers on the kitchen staff of his return, because one of them—a stocky, older woman formerly of Westruun before the Conclave—dropped an entire tray of silverware when she found him looting the pantry.

“Please don’t look at me that way, Martha, or else I’ll start to think you’d all written me off as dead,” said Percy, bending to pick up the forks and spoons while she begged him not to trouble himself. 

Martha insisted on heating and pouring the water for him. Once she had arranged a tray with the teapot, its matching ceramic cups, embroidered napkins, and a covered tin of biscuits, she sent him off again. 

The sound of Percy’s return roused Vex from her sleep. He had just set the tray on his side table and climbed back into bed when she rolled over to look at him.

“You’re still here,” she murmured.

Vex smiled sleepily, and Percy lost whatever he had planned to say. It couldn’t have been that important. Instead, he leaned in to brush the backs of his fingers along the curve of her face.

“Good morning. Can I tempt you with a cup of tea?”

“Tea?” Vex said, bemused. “Back in your habits, like you were never gone...”

Percy was already pouring. He filled the cup three quarters full and carefully passed it to her, handle-out. “I prefer to think of it as a ritual.”

She sat up to accept the drink from him. “A ritual... that does sound more intimate, doesn’t it?”

Vex took the cup with two hands and brought it close to her chest. She breathed in the steam, visibly enjoying the warmth and the smell with a comfy little shiver. Percy settled down with his own cup, a pillow propped behind his back.

“This is the first cup of tea someone’s brought me in bed since the day you disappeared,” she said to him. “It took you being gone for me to notice that you’ve been doing it for years and years, every day.”

“I’m just grateful you didn’t find someone else to do it,” he said, only half joking. After the episode with Katie, he had been marginally concerned that when he returned home, he’d find Frederick Zimmerman lounging in his study.

“I mean it! Not that I didn’t notice, necessarily. Just that there were so many things I took for granted... little things. Remembering Percival’s mittens when he takes them out of his coat pockets. Singing goodnight lullabies. Fixing toys... So many toys. It’s like all they do is break things.”

Percy took a sip of tea, more to give himself time to loosen the knot in his throat than anything else, though the caffeine would help. It was a black tea, with a pleasant, floral aftertaste he rather liked. Not quite bergamot, not quite jasmine.

He took a second sip and lowered the cup. “I’m so sorry, Vex.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said quickly. “You didn’t mean to go.”

“No, I didn’t. But I’m sorry for everything you’ve had to deal with, and I’m sorry you had to do it on your own. I can’t begin to imagine it.”

“I wasn’t quite on my own. Our family was here for us when we needed them.”

“I know, but even so.” He cradled the cup in his hands. “There were a thousand times where I should have been there, and I wasn’t. A thousand things I missed.”

“And there will be thousands more,” Vex assured him. She patted her stomach. “A thousand and one.”

They fell quiet for a minute or so, but Percy felt an odd tension in it. He busied himself with looking about while she worked on her tea. The light was rising now in earnest, cool and grey, the perfect Whitestone morning. It let the room come into focus around him. The furniture and the decor looked the same (setting aside the tacky funeral-reunion decorations). 

In reality, not much had changed at all, except for them. And the extent of that was yet to be seen. A part of him wanted to ask what had happened while he was gone—the details of how they solved the mystery, and all the mundane life that happened in between—but another part didn’t want to know. Not yet, anyway. Though there were one or two thoughts at the forefront.

“I dreamed you,” Percy said suddenly.

“Just the once?” said Vex—incredibly, with a hint of playfulness.

“You know what I mean. On the cliff, at Dalen’s closet…” Percy saw her recognition. “Perhaps I should have led with that yesterday.”

“Perhaps you should have,” she agreed.

“Was it a ritual of some sort?”

Vex shook her head. “No, I—assumed that was your and Kima’s doing. Or else a coincidence.”

“Interesting…”

“It’s difficult for me to imagine a plane without magic,” said Vex.

“I thought I had,” said Percy, sighing, “but I was wrong.”

“Was there ever magic? And maybe the gods just took it back, like with the Divergence?”

“My instinct is to say no. By all objective measures, it’s a plane with no gods and no potential for the arcane. And yet... there’s plenty of lore about those things. All colored as fiction, of course. It’s almost an obsession for them.”

“So the question is whether it’s long-lost history, or just the nature of people to want for those things.”

“That sounds right.”

“I would be curious to see it in person,” Vex said deviously. “One portrait doesn’t do it justice. And between Keyleth and Allura, I’ll bet we could get there.”

Percy shot her a look that conveyed more alarm than he’d intended. “It’s far too dangerous to ever try,” he said. “Who knows how reality would bend us when we got through the other side of the gate?”

“I know, I know,” she said. “I just said I was curious! But without going there, it’s hard to picture what you were up to all that time in the strange metal-and-stone feywild.”

“A lot of reading… a _lot_ of reading. And altogether too much drinking,” he added. “In the first part, anyway.”

Vex didn’t miss the implication. “It can’t have _all_ been terrible.”

“You’re not wrong. In different circumstances, maybe I would have taken it better. Some of the cultists over there really seemed to like it,” he said. “Apparently a bunch of them cut loose and ran off to make a life there—did you know that?”

“No!”

“It was becoming a bit of a problem for them towards the end. That’s the sense I got, anyhow.”

Vex went from looking scandalized to looking amused. “Good for them, I say.”

“Good for them,” Percy echoed, with a grim chuckle. “As for me, the best thing that world did was spit me back out in one piece. Mostly one piece.”

“Yes, about that...” Vex finished her drink and set it aside. “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night.”

“Which part?”

“What you said about me believing that you are who you say you are.”

Leisurely, Vex sat up straight and began to stretch. She arched her back, rolling her shoulders with a long, indulgent yawn. That was when he noticed that she was wearing a shirt lined with buttons down the front. He recognized it as one of his.

Percy had been watching her, but caught himself and averted his gaze. “Have you had second thoughts?”

“Not really,” she replied, tossing the blanket aside. “I’m ninety-five... between ninety-five and ninety-eight percent sure that you’re actually Percival Frederickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo the third.”

“That’s more confident than _I_ was that I was Percival Frederickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo the third, at times.”

“Yes. Even so.”

Before Percy had a chance to react, she had swung one leg over his to kneel above his hips.

“This is my husband we’re talking about,” Vex said, gently lifting the cup from his slackened grasp and setting it on the table. “I need to be one hundred percent sure.”

Tipping her head close to his, Vex reached up and smoothed her thumb over his eyebrow. “You certainly sound familiar. And you look very much like him.”

She stroked his cheekbone, and then his bottom lip, studying his face closely. Percy fought to keep still, but he leaned into her touch, his heart already rising in his chest. Vex brushed her nose to his and kissed the upturned corner of his mouth. 

“Hmm… do you kiss like him, I wonder?”

Her eyes flicked to meet his before she kissed him again, properly this time. Slow and sweet, enough to draw the breath out of him. All at once, the pent-up longing of their time apart seemed to settle in the small space between them, keen on release. She pressed a little deeper, just testing; he followed along, gladly, until—too soon—she broke away. Percy tried to catch her there, but she was too quick for him.

Vex found his right hand and lifted it in both of hers. She inspected it, looking first at his palm, and then his knuckles. She paused at the place where the skin had healed poorly after his injury, at the crest of the fist. 

“I missed your hands,” she said, touching her lips to the scar as she spoke. “I want to know they’re yours.”

She ducked down to kiss him a third time. His hands were on her now, and hers making quick work of the laces on the front of his shirt. She only got halfway through with them before she gave up on it. They broke apart just long enough for her to yank the shirt over his head. Percy’s glasses knocked askew; she made to take those off next, but he stopped her, pushing them back up the bridge of his nose. Blurriness would not do after months of separation.

The knot at the top of his waist was already undone, somehow, and the fabric sliding down his hips. Percy let her do it, but he made a little sound of warning in the back of his throat that caught her attention. Annoyed as he had been to hear Scanlan’s two cents last night about the woes of time and distance—and even worse as it was to hear the taunting voice in his head now—he had not been one hundred percent wrong.

“Easy—” he said against her mouth. A request more than an instruction.

The message got through. Vex eased back from him, straightening up on her knees. All the lovely color had returned to her face. And she had that look that he recognized; the one that made his body flush and prickle. It was difficult for both of them to go slow, with her breath already quickened and his eagerness so plain. But she hesitated, and closed her hand over his again, and drew it away from where he’d been working his way down the buttons of her top (his top, technically).

Vex turned his hand over and gently pressed it open, then one by one, kissed each finger. First the little finger, then the ring, and the middle. When she reached his index finger, she edged the tip into her mouth to nip it lightly with her teeth. Percy swallowed.

“Show me,” she said.

So he did. Skimming his palms up the back of her thighs, he paused at the place where the hem of her shirt hung a few inches below the hip. The intensity of her expression melted away when his fingers finally rose up and met her there. Her eyelids fluttered and closed, and Percy watched with hunger, and melancholy, and the deepest affection and all the rest as she swayed and sighed and mumbled nonsense little sounds. Her forearms arms fell around his neck; his hair was too short in the back for her to grasp, but it didn’t stop her nails from running up the back of his head and digging lightly into his scalp.

The room had blurred around him, faded out with the sounds of the birds outside their window, and the honied smell of the last of the tea in the pot. There was just Vex kneeling over him, and the song of her voice in her breath, and the sweat gathering at the small of her back, and her hair tumbling over her shoulders. Just Vex, Vex, Vex.

Right when she reached that place where her breath went feathery light, and he knew he could tease her no more without pushing her over the edge, she grabbed his wrist and cut him short. If he’d had the capacity for disappointment by then, he would not have had time for it. Vex had already shifted herself forward, and as she eased down onto his hips, they both gasped.

“Oh, fuck,” she breathed, bracing against him. “There you are, y—”

Percy cut her off with a kiss, and the strangled sound that rose in her throat got tangled up between them. He let it rattle in his mouth before it died, drowned by his own groan and the taste of her on his tongue.

Her fingers traced a line down his center and settled on his thighs, and from there, it did not take them long. They had been warm before, but now they were melting, skin hot and sticky where their bodies pressed together. Their foreheads met, then their lips, kisses growing more fervent. Percy felt a bead of sweat roll past his eye on its way down his jaw and didn’t know whether it was hers or his. His breathing became ragged, choked with effort, but he found the will to hang on a few precious seconds longer, and that was all she needed.

Vex didn’t stifle it, because she never, ever did—and why should she? The walls were thick, they were alone, their secrets bare and exposed between them. So she let the sensation overflow into her voice, into the tail end of each breath. Too, too much. Percy was nearly overcome already, but then she caught him in a kiss, and stayed there as the shudder began to run through them. She stiffened, gasped, and whimpered against his mouth as it took hold of them both. The sound was demure and soft, unbelievably soft, a whisper meant solely for his ears.

They fell sideways across the sheets, still locked together, clutching at each other like some force was trying to pry them apart. 

It took longer than usual to recover. With his face buried in her neck, Percy was too comfortable and exhausted to find the effort to budge. He could feel her pulse pounding against his ear. He listened to her breathing until it deepened and returned to normal. Only once it had did Vex prop herself up to appraise him once more.

“And don’t you ever, ever fucking leave me again,” she said, between kisses to his neck, his collarbone.

“I won’t,” Percy said drowsily, eyes still closed, looping a lock of her long hair between his fingers.

This was not the kind of promise he could actually put his word behind, as evidenced by his absence. Vex knew that, though—same as she knew he would tell her anything she wanted to hear just now. Satisfied enough with his response, she fell back down beside him and snuggled up into the crook of his shoulder. Percy draped a possessive arm across her waist to keep her there.

“I do feel better now—recalibrated, you could say,” Vex said, with a slight laugh that hummed right through him.

“Mmm,” he agreed.

“Maybe we can finally get back to normal.”

“Maybe.” Percy opened one eye to find Vex watching him. The smirk playing on her lips had a contagious effect. “Perhaps in an hour. I think I could still use some calibration.”

* * *

In the end, it was a lot more than an hour. By the time they emerged from the privacy of their bedroom, freshly dressed and considerably more content than they had entered it, breakfast time had come and gone, and the rest of their friends had disbursed to their diversions for the day. Percy was starving—he’d realized that his last meal had been the sandwich he’d had at the deli on his way back from the hospital—but after a quick bite, they headed out of the castle together toward the house where Allura and Kima stayed.

The first person they met on their route was Scanlan, who didn’t notice them—he was sitting on a patch of grass in one of the smaller gardens, with several instruments spread out before him. The white cord dangled from his ears, and as they passed by him, they saw his eyes closed and his head bobbing slightly. His fingers were making movements in the air as if he were playing his shawm, but there was nothing in his hands. Clearly focusing hard, Scanlan’s brow furrowed, and he paused halfway through an imaginary note, muttering to himself.

Percy caught the tail end of it: “—but no, it’s not the right timbre—”

“Scanlan?” said Vex, at a volume that anyone without music blasting in their ears would have heard. When he did not respond, she said to Percy, “Is he okay? What’s he doing?”

“With any amount of luck, you’ll find out soon.”

They kept on their way, with Vex shooting concerned glances back over her shoulder every so often until they progressed beyond the view of Scanlan’s set-up. She forgot about him almost immediately after that, though, because no sooner had they reached the open gates of the castle than another familiar figure crossed their path.

“I thought we might be seeing you,” said Kima.

Percy thought it almost strange to see her in her old getup again. Dressed as ever for work in simple, well-worn clothing, Kima stopped on the road to greet them. Her armor was absent, but the enormous great sword hung from a strap across her back, its point almost trailing a line across the pavers behind her. In her arms, she had three ivory candles and a tinderbox along with a rolled-up woven mat. The smell of incense wafted over as they approached her. 

“You look busy,” Percy observed, taking in her appearance.

“Nah, just heading back from the Parchwood. It’s a good place to reconnect with a higher power.” Kima tapped her hand to her chest, where her holy symbol lay on a chain across the front of her shirt. “And morning is the best time for meditation and worship, if you ask me.”

“That’s funny, because we were up to something similar,” Vex piped up, looping her arm through Percy’s. She nodded her head toward him and added, “He did most of the worshipping, though.”

“The spirit needs what it needs,” Percy said mildly.

Kima pulled a face that was half a grimace and half exasperation.

“I forgot how gross you two are,” she said. “Allie’s back at the house—she sent a message to your dad this morning, Vex.”

“Did she?” Vex said. “Did he say when they’d be back?”

“I dunno. You can ask her if you want.”

“Shall we follow you, then—?”

“Actually—Lady Kima, if I could have a word,” Percy cut in. “Would you mind if we found somewhere to speak?”

Kima eyed him warily, shifting the bulky items in her arms. “Sure.”

“I’ll go talk to Allura,” said Vex. She pulled away from him, but seemed to reconsider as she was about to leave. Her hand returned to his arm, and she squeezed it, suddenly serious. “Stay close by, all right?” she said.

“All—all right,” he agreed, taken aback. “We’ll head to the sun tree, and meet you at the house if you don’t find us first.”

She let go of him, and with a lingering look, set off to find Allura.

Percy and Kima watched her leave. Only once she was gone did Kima say, “Well, she’s not threatening to shoot you today. So that’s an improvement, I guess.”

“I would have done the same,” he said.

“Oh, I know,” said Kima, lifting her right leg because her arms were too full to point at it. “You literally shot me.”

“How’s the knee?”

She shrugged, unfazed. “Good as new. Magic’ll do that to ya.”

“It does have its uses, I suppose. Shall we walk?”

With noon creeping up on them, the roads were busy with pedestrians going about their daily business. Farmers pushed their carts or followed behind their towing livestock while merchants stood at their concessions, shouting deals and haggling loudly with their customers. A few children played outside their parents’ shops. His city was alight with the sounds and colors of a promising, fruitful life.

Percy thought back to the last place where he and Kima had walked together alone, and the way the asphalt had smelled, and the blue skies obscured by a thousand jutting towers.

She seemed to read his mind. “It’s weird, isn’t it?”

“A bit…”

“We’re gonna get out of town later today, once everyone is up to speed on the details of what happened. I'm pretty eager to get home. But first, I want to hear about how they tracked down the location of the ritual, and how the cultists pulled us out of bed in the first place.”

“I have some ideas on that as well,” said Percy. “To see that something like this doesn’t happen again.”

“It had better fucking not.”

“Vecna has got nothing better to do than find new pawns and try again… my hope is that in the future, we won’t be caught so off guard.”

They had reached the center of town, where the din was loudest, but with none of the noise. Percy felt a reverent chill as the sun tree came into view, its many long boughs spread wide in every direction, looming tall and broad over the square. Save for some blue silk ribbons that someone had fastened in celebration of Winter’s Crest, the branches were bare in the winter gloom. Percy was glad to see it. In a circle around the tree, four benches sat in equal distance from one another. One of them housed a young woman, deep into a book. Percy pointed to the empty bench on the opposite side of the tree, and he and Kima sat down on it after Kima had set all her prayer implements on the ground.

“How are you doing?” he asked her, as she slung the sword off of her back.

Her hands now free, she touched the symbol around her neck, looping the chain through her fingers. She nodded, slowly, and said, “I’m… just me.”

“Good.”

“Yeah. I knew there was too much going on in my head, but I didn’t realize how much until I was alone in there again.”

“Are there any gaps in your memory about what happened?” he asked.

“No. It’s… I remember everything that happened from the time we met. Everything before that is more like—I remember that I thought certain things and knew certain things, but I don’t actually have that information anymore.”

“Huh. And how about after?”

“It’s similar—actually, here’s a good example!” Kima started feeling her pockets in search for an item. “I brought this to the kitchen this morning to show your cooks, but when I got there—here it is—”

She had retrieved a folded piece of paper. It was too white, the edges too perfect to be of this plane. Kima offered it to him.

“It’s the recipe for panang curry,” she said, as Percy was unfolding the page. “I wrote it down before we left. See, that’s _my_ handwriting.” She jabbed at the slanted lines of pen ink. “But when I went to read it to them—”

“You didn’t know the language anymore.”

“Right! And I didn’t bother to memorize it, so now I just don’t know it.”

“Well, I understand what you’re saying now, but it’s not a good example of _your_ particular predicament.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he said, folding the paper in half, “I can’t read it either.”

Kima sat up straight, her knee knocking into his as she leapt to her feet. “What?” she said, aghast. “I was counting on you!”

“Sorry,” he shrugged. “I don’t suppose you still know jujitsu, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, well. Still a very reasonable price for what we got, though, isn’t it?”

He raised his hands in a general gesture to the space around them—the tree, the passers-by who didn’t seem to notice them, the crude drawing someone had carved into the bench. Still visibly disappointed, and grumbling to herself, Kima sat back down and tucked the slip of paper back in her pocket. A tepid wordlessness settled over them, then. Percy knew what he had come here to say, but now that he was here, the thought of saying it aloud made him falter.

Luckily, Kima stopped him from having to speak first. “Do you think she survived?”

He had been thinking on that same question since Pike first cast the restoration spell. “I do,” he said, sounding more optimistic than he had in his head.

“With no body?”

“She had a body before you showed up. And if the plane can’t tolerate the notion of a disembodied person floating around…” He shrugged again. “I don’t see why not. I do feel a little bad about bankrupting her now.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that…”

“No?”

“No.” Kima glanced off momentarily. “She's got her contingencies.”

Percy laughed. “Of course she does.”

“Thank you for shooting me, by the way,” said Kima. “And for taking that hit in the fight. And—for everything else, I guess. I couldn’t have figured out all of that if you weren’t there. And also,” she said, more reservedly, “for finding me on that plane, and snapping me out of that spell. If you hadn’t come along, I’d still be over there, thinking I was someone else.”

“That was actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” Percy said. “I wanted to thank you for saving me.”

“Ah, it was nothing. I just gave you a push at the end.” 

She said it flippantly, but Percy had a distinct recollection of the fear he’d heard in her voice during his phases out of consciousness as she half-dragged him through the portal.

“I owe you thanks for that as well, but that’s not what I was talking about.”

Percy had to pause and steel himself with a breath before he turned to look at Kima. He had her full attention, but she seemed wary, even alarmed by his abrupt seriousness.

“When I first saw you,” he began hesitantly, “I was very near the end of my life. I didn’t know the difference between fiction and reality, and I had reached a point where I couldn’t stand to be in my own head any longer. I don’t know what exactly would have happened, but… a few more weeks of that, I fear, would have been irreversible.”

Kima’s mouth fell into a hard line. Eventually, after a long moment, she clapped a hand to his thigh, just above the knee, and gave it a little shake.

“We did good, Percy.” She hopped down from the bench, took up her sword, and swung it back into place. “And for what it’s worth… you were a pretty okay roommate.”

“Likewise,” he said, extending a hand.

Kima clasped it, and they shook hands, eyeing each other for a moment in mutual amusement until they gave it up and hugged instead.

“I might actually miss you,” he said, somewhat choked from the crushing force of her arms.

When they had let go, Kima patted the side of his face, and said, “Don’t be a stranger, all right?”

“Not on this plane,” said Percy. “Not on any plane.”

Without another word, Kima gathered up her effects and left him there alone. Percy waited. He had no idea when Vex would join him, but he was not in any hurry; there were no books to read, notes to take, strange places or people to visit. 

He stood and moved closer to the tree. The wind was calm today, but the blue ribbons tied to the branches were stirring just slightly, fluttered by an imperceptible current. Percy caught one of them and rubbed it with his thumb. The silk felt cool to the touch in the frigid winter air.

Following the length of ribbon up to the top, he grasped the branch and gently pulled it down to eye level. It bent, but did not snap. He inspected the knots, felt the bark with his fingers. This limb alone had a dozen or more branches budding off of it, and more off of those. In the spring it would grow thick with blossoms, and in the fall, rich with the colors of the sun.

“It still looks better every day, doesn’t it?”

The branch slipped from his hand at the sound of her voice, and almost whipped him in the face as it shot back up to its normal height. Percy spun around to find Vex standing there, her warm breath rising in a cloud as she spoke. 

“Is there any news?” he said.

“Keyleth is waiting for them at the teleportation circle,” Vex said. “They’ll meet us here, but… I wanted to be with you when they arrived.”

Percy waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. The benches were all empty now, leaving them alone beneath the low-hanging arms of the tree. Standing there among the quiet din of the town, they seemed to be waiting for something else. He couldn’t put words to it, but he felt it, like a pressure in his lungs.

At last, Vex broke the silence. “Are you nervous?”

“A little,” he said, with an anxious breathiness that gave him away.

Vex closed the distance between them with a few cautious steps. “I’m not,” she said, tilting her head to look up at him. “I have been for months. I’ve been so sick over it. But not anymore.”

He’d had a thought—not now, but months ago. A singular, pitch-black thought that had nearly subsumed him. Percy had shaken free from its shadow, but it had left him ragged. For a while, he was afraid that he could never be the same.

“Percy,” she said intently, seeing the doubt in his face. “It’s going to be all right.”

She said it now the same way she’d said it last night: with genuine belief. Percy responded with a slow nod, not wholly convinced. Vex adjusted his coat, tugging the collar up close around his neck to shield him from the cold.

“I love you,” she said. Here, in the first place she’d ever told him.

Percy couldn’t see the shadow anymore. In this place, under the tree's protective arms, with Vex standing there before him, there was just no room for it. He’d climbed out of the empty well, and the hollowness in his chest had begun to fill again.

“I love you, Vex,” Percy answered. He cradled her face in his hands. “I love you.”

He kissed her.

They could have lingered there a lifetime, or more. Time was nothing in the safe comfort of their closeness. But a distant sound caught their ears, parting them. The high shriek of a delighted laugh was not a foreign sound in the square these days—it was not even the first he’d heard today since coming down to the square—but it was so familiar to them both, and clearer now than the most vivid dream.

Percy and Vex whipped around in the direction of the sound. The road toward the Third House was still clear, but beyond the cluster of shops, they heard a second little voice join the first.

“Vesper, look! I can see the sun tree!”

“I see it! I see it!”

They cut through Keyleth’s hopeless calls for order (“Slow down, kids! Hold hands! Just wait for—agh, okay!”), drawing ever closer, out of sight. 

Percy watched the spot, transfixed, jaw clenched, holding his breath. Beside him, in his periphery, Vex had begun to grin. His throat was too tight for him to speak, but he reached out, blindly, with his right hand and found her left. Their fingers laced together. The pain in his knuckles was a figment, nothing at all.

He waited, standing side-by-side with Vex at the base of the sun tree. After an eternity, four tiny figures turned the corner into view: three on foot, and one in Keyleth’s arms as she struggled to catch up with them.

Percy was trembling badly now, but Vex held him tight. And as he watched their children barrel towards him, in their unbridled joy and unabashed laughter, he believed.


End file.
